


Regrowth

by keeptheearthbelow



Category: Hunger Games Series - All Media Types, Hunger Games Trilogy - Suzanne Collins
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-03
Updated: 2013-03-23
Packaged: 2017-12-04 06:42:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 10
Words: 63,809
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/707725
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/keeptheearthbelow/pseuds/keeptheearthbelow
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Of course this is how it would happen: in public, far too quickly. Of course this is the way we will finally let each other go.” Katniss and Peeta and District Twelve in the wake of the war. Slight AU/canon divergence. This story takes a little different approach to how they relate to society and each other.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Break what's left

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this nearly a year and a half ago out of the usual motivation, being dissatisfied with the end of Mockingjay, but it wasn't until starting to read THG fanfic that I realized that some of my points of dissatisfaction are apparently not all that common. I didn't like the matchy-matchiness of Katniss's and Peeta's injuries; I felt the “mental Avox” thing didn't add much; wild primroses aren't bushes but herbaceous plants; I thought the “for Prim” vote was out of character and I wanted to explore what other than craftiness would make Katniss vote yes. Not that these are inherently bad; they just didn't work for me for various reasons. I've enjoyed reading others' takes on the pre-epilogue time so much, so I've finally gotten up my courage to post, and hopefully someone will find my take interesting. 
> 
> A bit of orienting information: This story begins approximately at Chapter 25, paragraph 11 of Mockingjay. For the scenes that most closely mirror the end of the book, I wrote from memory and compared them to the text later — so I didn't directly copy, if you wonder, but the changes are generally on purpose. I was kind of having fun with Chapter 1 here as an exercise in editing and revision … sorry, nerd alert. Chapter 2 moves out of the Capitol and begins more original content. All 10 chapters continue to make use of canon elements through the epilogue.
> 
> Hat tip to Smarty Pants Sue's post at foreveryoungadult.com for a specific insight about Peeta. Also, my gratitude to those who got me to be brave and post, and to Suzanne Collins for such inspiring work.

↔ Part One: Alone ↔  
↔ Break what's left ↔ 

When the morphling begins to ebb, stranding me on the shore of my own consciousness, I realize that I have been seeing the same people next to me for some time now — real, rather than not real. A man who seems to be a doctor, who is plainly a Capitol citizen, but who does nothing I ever see to treat me. Actual doctors and nurses, harder to recognize because they come and go. Haymitch, very yellow. The first time I notice him he's holding a pad of paper and a box of bright sticks of chalk and saying, “Will they let him have these?” The one I wish I didn't recognize is my mother. She looks like a ghost, less substantial than the dead who keep me company in my dreams. She is often sleeping when she's by my bedside, sometimes eating instead, sometimes staring into space in a way that plunges me into cold dread, certain I must find my bow and get to the woods, certain it's the only chance of survival. Though I am no longer certain who is left to save. Perhaps there is no one, not even her, not even myself. I can't move anyway.

At some point they turn me over onto my back, just to see how that goes. As the experiment ends in whimpering misery and another shot of morphling, I think I see Peeta being walked slowly along the ward. But his arms are made of bandages and both of his legs are shining artificially, and I cannot see enough of his face to read it.

After more experiments and more time, more receding tides, I can lie on my back and I can wear a hospital gown. They move me to a recovery ward, equally as full as the burn ward but at least less thick with pain. The doctor who does nothing still comes to see me. He is a head doctor, but unlike Johanna's back in District Thirteen, he does not reassure me that I'm safe, or give me advice that will only end up upsetting people, or pretend to sympathize with me. He just asks me if I feel like talking, and when I shake my head, he accepts my silence and leans his chair back against the wall and takes a nap. This is fine by me. At least someone finds the recovery ward restful.

Haymitch and my mother still show up. My mother doesn't try to talk to me or make me talk, either. When she's functioning, she holds my hand or strokes my hair — it's still long in front, where it wasn't burned off — and I find I don't really mind this. Haymitch talks to me, but it's only to get me to eat and to take my pills. I go along with his instructions but I think my compliance bothers him. He also tells me occasional updates about people who lived. I usually try not to listen to the updates because there are far too many names I will never hear among the list. 

Still, I absorb that Cressida, Pollux, and Tigris are unhurt and back to their lives. Peeta's here. Haymitch tells me that Gale is alive too, though he took two bullets while escaping the Peacekeepers. But Gale has not turned up among the real people who pass by my bed. 

Another doctor appears — where did they get them all, in the Capitol? From one of the districts, like the Peacekeepers, or from their own people? — and this doctor has me practice movements to stretch and fold my new skin as if it were as good as the old skin. Short walks, bending my knees, my hips, arching my back forward and backward. Lifting my arms and seeing how far I can move them. I'm wheeled to a room with mirrors and she has me practice where I can see myself. This is pointless because I don't want to look at myself. If I wanted to see that, I would put an olive next to the skin of a piglet and put a strip of dried meat along the seam. 

Even if I'm not looking at the movements I have to practice, I recognize a pattern in them. The doctor is making sure I can still use a bow.

I am moved to a private room somewhere and I take this as a bad sign. It's too nice. I am still on a very small dose of morphling and I think this place may be in a different building, but I can't be sure. The nurses who move me here act perky and tell me to lie down and have a rest and then they leave.

It's too much like the Training Center. I still cannot form enough of a sentence to explain this to anyone, and the only person I've seen lately who would even be likely to understand is Haymitch and he hasn't shown up here yet because I have only just gotten here myself. 

I am standing in the center of the room, petrified, when the door opens and President Coin walks in. I hold still. I haven't seen her since Thirteen, which was before I stole my squad and practically deserted, and which also feels like a thousand years ago, but I discover that I still know a snake when I see one.

Bizarrely, she smiles at me. “Katniss. Good to see you're on your feet. I saved him for you.” 

At my uncomprehending look, she says, “Snow. His sentencing concluded yesterday, and we'll execute him tomorrow.”

She waits. I wait, too, to feel something, but I can't seem to find anything at all. “Oh,” I say, barely audible. 

She smiles at me again. “Don't worry, no one expected you to be following the trial. We'll have your team here to prepare you in the morning.”

She turns, her mystifying hair turning perfectly with her, and walks out. 

I sit down on the bed, carefully, and look out the window. The last of the year's leaves wave against a gray sky. I don't know where I am. For all I know I could have seen this same tree, these same leaves full and surrounded by hundreds of their kin when I was in the Capitol this past summer, waiting to be sent into the second arena. 

I am still waiting to feel like something has changed. Like anything has changed.

Nurses bring my supper, check whether I take my pills, examine the healing skin all down my back. When they leave I fall asleep before I can decide whether to eat the supper. It's lamb stew with plums.

I wake up early the next morning — I never closed the curtains, and the Capitol is not as brightly lit as it used to be and the first hint of dawn is noticeable. I try the door to my room and find that it isn't locked. No one is outside. I am in a richly decorated hallway with many other doors. Sounds of running water come from behind some of them. I wander around for what feels like a long time before I piece together that this is the President's mansion, and I must have come from one of the wings where people in the new government are housed. It is still nearly dark. I walk along in my robe and bare feet, looking at the trophies and portraits, thinking of their cost.

The first people I see are stationed on either side of a pair of heavy doors. One does a double take. The other shifts his grip on his gun. “Miss, go back where you came from,” he says.

I stare at him mutely, wondering where on earth he thinks that is, wondering whether anyone could ever go back where they came from. 

The first guard nudges him. “That's Katniss Everdeen,” he says. 

“I know that, but she can't go in there.”

A third voice says, “It's all right.” 

I turn and recognize Paylor, the commander from District Eight. The guards must be her people, because they snap to attention. She no longer has a bloody bandage around her neck or the stink of field hospitals and bombs, but she hardly looks any better. I probably shouldn't be one to talk.

She eyes me, then says, “You do want to go in there, I take it?”

I nod.

“Okay, but I'll accompany you,” she says. “Your time will come later but I don't see why you shouldn't be allowed to face him.” 

I manage to say, “Thank you.” Then she grips me by the elbow and the guards open the doors and I learn who she's talking about, because the stench of roses hits me. 

Paylor's grip on my arm has somehow propelled me into the midst of the roses. It's a greenhouse, filled with nothing but roses. I guess this is what you get when you're the President. I guess when you're the President and on trial and sentenced to die, you get to stay with your roses up till the last minute, instead of being sent somewhere you don't know filled with people you've never seen who make you feel foolish. I guess Coin would have allowed Snow to have this to set a precedent, in case she ever falls from power someday. 

I can hear my breath in my throat and Paylor is looking at me funny. She looks around, then says, “Katniss, let me ask, what exactly did you come here for?”

Images are rushing through my brain but I am lucky enough to find one that might not seem crazy. I clear my throat. “A white rose. For when I shoot him. He'll know what it's about.” 

She shrugs, looks around again. I wonder if she's looking for him. I wonder if she's at all frightened by him, if she's ever met him. She leads me toward a bank of white roses not too far away. I step away from her to study them. I find a half-open bud that resembles the one he left on my dresser back in Twelve. Paylor hands me pruning shears from somewhere. I pull my sleeve over my hand before gripping the stem, then snip the flower away. 

“Perfection,” comes the voice, but it may as well be a hiss. I spin toward the sound, and there he is, sitting amid a bank of pink and red. Lover's roses. The ones that used to be for Peeta and me and then were spread over a fresh crater in the ground.

He has pruning shears in his hand, too, but he puts them down and folds his hands over his knee and looks at me. His eyes flick over my shoulder and I realize that Paylor is still there and I am glad of this, that at least I won't have to be alone, even if all that's about to happen is that I get humiliated and terrified.

Snow coughs into a handkerchief which is spotted pink and red. He says to me, “I was very sorry to hear of the death of your sister.”

I finally feel something. Rage. Before I can move or speak, he says, “Come now, Miss Everdeen, surely you can let me be sorry for the loss of a child whose death served no purpose. She and all the others she thought she was helping. Of course, their deaths may have served someone's purpose, if not mine. Those parachutes … well.” He waits a moment. “The work of a Head Gamemaker if I ever saw it.”

“Your work,” I growl.

He clicks his tongue. “Miss Everdeen, I thought you and I agreed not to lie to each other. It was their living bodies that were of use to me. I was preparing to surrender, you know. But would it have been accepted? Perhaps a desperate man would take a few more souls along with him. Certainly the incident at the City Circle virtually assured that none of my own citizens would ever seek to reinstate me.” 

I am shaking. I see him but I also see Prim on fire and I would rather see him on fire. “Your hovercraft,” I say.

“And how hard is it to paint the Seal of Panem on a hovercraft? Tell me, if I had any hovercraft left at my disposal, why wasn't I using them to escape instead of hiding behind a wall of children?”

My body lunges forward of its own volition. Paylor's hands catch me before I've gotten two steps, twist the pruning shears from my grip, find my elbows again. “Katniss, time to leave.”

Snow is coughing into the handkerchief again and it's getting redder. I am half twisted in his direction as Paylor pulls me away. “We were well played against each other. You might think about who put you in this position,” he calls after us.

I find myself in the Training Center-style room again with no real memory of getting there, no idea where or when Paylor left me. The white rose is still gripped inside the fabric of my sleeve. I straighten out its stem and plop it into a glass of water in the bathroom. Then I get back into the bed and pull the covers over my head, hiding as if I were back in Thirteen somewhere, and hope that this will turn out to have been a new kind of nightmare. But my little sister is a torch that burns in the darkness. There is only room in this world for one girl on fire and it must no longer be me because I am drowning. 

It is broad daylight when my prep team gently shakes me awake. They seem happy to see me at first, but when they usher me into a freshly drawn bath, even Venia gasps at the sight of my skin. Flavius has his hands clapped over his mouth and I think of Fulvia back in Thirteen, gagging at the scar on my arm. But he doesn't leave the room. 

“I was just sent out of the hospital last night,” I whisper, wishing I could reassure them by saying something else, like maybe that it doesn't hurt or I don't mind it. But I do. The attentions of these people got me used to thinking I could be pretty.

Octavia blinks back tears and Venia reaches for my hand. “We'll do our best to be gentle,” she assures me. And they do, as they help me into and out of the bath, pat me dry, put just enough makeup on my face to hide how unwell I am. Flavius works some kind of hair miracle on my head, making it look like my hair is uneven on purpose. As they zip me into the Mockingjay costume, the door opens and in comes Effie. Of all people. Teetering on high heels, her hair still dyed gold.

Nothing has changed. I'm the one who has lost equilibrium.

Effie has a funny look, real blankness replacing her old vapidity, such as where the exclamation points should have been at the end of “Well, Katniss, looks like another big, big, big day.” She explains to me that I am being prepped for Snow's execution ceremony, and I try to pay attention to what she tells me to do during the ceremony, but it doesn't seem very complicated and I have trouble listening to her anyway. Over her voice is playing another voice that says, “The work of a Head Gamemaker if I ever saw it.” I try to shake the voice out of my ears by nodding in the right places.

When she goes away, Haymitch comes in and, as usual, makes me eat and take my pills. The prep team begins packing up their things in the bathroom. I could hardly eat regardless of whether they were still buzzing around me — I am choked by the words and images that I can't shake. I realize that this is a very small opportunity. 

“Haymitch?” I begin. But I didn't take a good enough look at him before speaking. He is halfway to the door and as he turns around I can see he's already been drinking for a long time today. Maybe never stopped yesterday. I stare at him, off balance. 

Barely looking at me — I am the Mockingjay, and there's nothing more to see — he slurs, “What is it, sweetheart? More boy trouble?”

I have a first shock of fury and then I am on my feet, knocking my tray over, but I can't speak. He just sways and looks at me. Then he is gone. 

Over his shoulder I see that my door is now guarded.

I try to clean up the spilled food. My prep team comes back in to help, and Octavia sits beside me and encourages me to eat what's left. She hands me a roll and I nearly cry out. Everything is happening all over again, and I am unable to stop seeing a side of it that I do not want to know.

Peeta was not the only person who could be used as an instrument to unhinge me. And there are not very many people who are in a position to send a thirteen-year-old girl into combat. Even one who's a medic and not a soldier.

I have not forgotten that Gale designed a trap that exploited human compassion. Or that he has not come to see me since Prim's death.

I look up and think for a moment that I see him because I'm thinking of him. But there he is, holding my Mockingjay bow and a quiver with a single arrow. 

He glances at Octavia and says, “Could you give us a minute?” She hops up and she and the others bump into each other as they try to figure out where to go. Finally they herd themselves into the bathroom and close the door behind them.

Gale is studying me. I make myself look back at him. He holds out the weapons and says, “It's supposed to be symbolic, you firing the last shot of the war.”

I can't remember if Effie said anything about that. I look at the single arrow. “What do I do if I miss?” 

“You won't,” he says. “Or maybe if you do, Coin will take her turn.”

I feel sick. “Gale,” I say, but I can't continue.

He drops his eyes for a moment. “I'm sorry I haven't come to see you till now. I'm glad you're on your feet.”

I swallow. “I think they got me on my feet specifically for this.” I wait, trying to find the right words. “There's a reason you haven't come to see me, isn't there?”

I have never, never seen Gale look ashamed. I wouldn't have thought shame could be a part of this man.

“Gale,” I struggle to continue, “did you and Beetee design the trap used at the City Circle?”

But shame is a part of him now. I can see in his face that he has wrestled these thoughts for a lot longer than I have. I can barely hear him when he answers me. “We designed something like it. We had bombs about that size and the chemicals that burn. I don't know if we had parachutes.” He looks sick too, stricken and white. “Katniss, I just don't know.”

I want to scream at him about what he's been doing with all his time if not finding out about the parachutes, the hovercraft, the order to send a child into battle. I want to hit him, I want to cry, I want to tell him that his traps were in good faith, that he couldn't have known, that my past is ugly and scarred too and filled with a long wake of unintended deaths. That dead is dead and nothing can be done. I want to say I can forgive him. But I am not the forgiving kind.

He seems to see all this go by on my face. He lets out a sound that maybe used to be a laugh. “That was the one thing I had going for me. Taking care of your family.” 

“Maybe we can find out the truth,” I say, but I don't believe it.

“You'll never be able to stop thinking this, though. So I think we both already know the truth.” His voice is so quiet.

We stand there with Prim's death between us. Would I have lost Gale anyway, I wonder, even if none of this had ever happened? Would our friendship, and the promise of something more, have faded away even if the Games had not reaped the girl and war had not welcomed the boy with open arms? If instead we had run away together to the woods? If not, then we are yet another casualty.

Gale lifts the strap of the quiver over my head and puts the bow in my hand. He looks at me for a moment, hands on my shoulders. “Shoot straight,” he says, and then he is gone too. 

I stare out the window. There is nothing out there but gray. 

I remember that my prep team is in the bathroom and I go in to find them. They are sitting in a row on the edge of the tub, huddled and forlorn. When they look up at me I find myself thinking that their world has ended too. 

I carry the odorous white rose out to the bedroom, and they put the finishing touches on me and then it's time to go. We say goodbye and Effie ushers me out along the same hallway I walked before dawn this morning. I feel ridiculous carrying my too-pretty bow and a rose in a cup. In the middle of one echoing silent room after another she puts a hand to her ear, which I see has a headset in it, and says, “That will put everything behind schedule, you know.” A pause. “All right, I'll bring her there.”

She says to me, “Just a short meeting and you'll be taken right from there to the ceremony.” We take some turns — I'm recognizing none of these spaces anymore, how big can this place be? — and she puts her hand on the knob of a heavy ornate door but then just stands there, looking at me with something like grief. Then she turns the knob and waves me through. 

I find myself in a room with a long table and many chairs, but the rich furnishings give off an aura of business, not banquets. At the far end of the table are six people: Haymitch, Peeta, Johanna, Annie, Beetee, and Enobaria. I can't imagine what we all are doing here. While I'm back in my Mockingjay costume, they're all in rebel uniforms, even Enobaria. There are crutches leaning against the table between Peeta and Annie. I make my way down and sit at the end beside Haymitch, putting the rose in its cup on the table in front of me and propping my bow where no one but me can reach it. The door behind the head of the table opens and President Coin walks in, unaccompanied. It's good that I'm far away from her. I will myself to hold still until I know what's going on. 

“Excellent,” Coin says upon seeing us. She takes her seat at the head of the table. “I asked for this private meeting because I believe you all are in a position to resolve a problem that really must be settled before we proceed with any more executions.” 

“Excuse me,” Johanna breaks in without any actual apology, “but why us, specifically?”

“You are the only surviving victors of the Hunger Games, and you are covered under the terms of what is called the Mockingjay Deal,” Coin answers. “Either you joined my people or Katniss bargained for your amnesty.” Johanna casts a disgusted glance at Enobaria, who is next to her. Enobaria returns it with interest. 

So my theft of my squad didn't undo the deal. Unless she has other reasons to keep me cooperating. Across the table, Peeta's eyes flick to mine and then away. Just like when we were still in school. I wonder if he knows, or cares, that the deal was for him.

“Our problem,” Coin continues, “is the question of what constitutes a just punishment for the citizens of the Capitol, for their part in this war and their treatment of the districts. As you know, executions of all the top leaders have already been ordered. But many of the people of Panem feel that this is not enough, after generations of exploitation, and there is a growing call for the summary execution of everyone who holds Capitol citizenship.”

“So?” Johanna says.

“So, this war has already left the human population at dangerously low levels. It will sink further if recovery efforts encounter very many hurdles at all. If the citizens of the Capitol are eliminated, we may suffer population collapse.”

“Keep them alive to breed with them?” Enobaria says. “Please.”

I don't know her at all and can't tell if she's being sarcastic. I don't know if she was used like Finnick.

Beetee says evenly, “I suppose all of us know how to make unsavory alliances.”

“I see your point,” Coin says, “but there is a third option that I want to have you consider. This option is to hold another Hunger Games. A final Hunger Games. The tributes would be drawn from the children of the Capitol.” Now she has every eye on her. “I think that this option would be best pursued only if it has the support of a majority of the living victors, and so I ask you to hold a vote, here and now. Your individual votes will not be publicized, only the vote of the majority.”

Everyone looks taken aback, maybe at the concept, maybe just at being asked to make such a rapid decision. Haymitch asks, “Who came up with this option? And who else is considering it?” 

“I did,” Coin says matter-of-factly, “and I have not presented it to anyone else yet. If you vote in favor, I will make the announcement after Snow's execution.” 

Eight people wait. Eventually, Coin says, “If you have no questions or adjustments to offer, then let's vote.”

She turns to Enobaria, who's on her immediate right. Enobaria shrugs. “I vote in favor.” 

I'd expect no less from District Two. But Johanna, next to her, likewise shrugs and says, “Sure. Let them have a taste of how it is.” 

The faces of my prep team flash before me. They already know how it is. But Peeta is bursting in, furious, though Coin hasn't called on him yet. “No! No, I vote no — how could you let this happen to anyone else? How could you do this to anyone? We of all people know this isn't justice!”

Coin doesn't want debate. She stares him down and turns to Annie, next to him. Pale as ice, Annie says, “I vote no. And so would Finnick.”

“But he isn't here, because Snow's mutts ate him,” Johanna snaps. Annie puts her hands over her ears.

Coin turns to the other side of the table. Beetee says, “The numbers aren't promising and there's no need to make them worse. I vote no.”

Coin looks at Haymitch. The clock on the wall is ticking and somewhere nearby Snow waits for me to kill him. When Haymitch looks back at her, all he says is, “I'm with the Mockingjay.” 

“That isn't a vote,” Coin tells him, annoyed. 

“Count my vote the same as hers, then,” Haymitch says, and he may be so drunk I can smell him as much as the rose, but his voice is steady beside me. 

I wonder how well he understands me. I know everyone is looking at me but I am looking at flames and blood and yellow flowers. Through the glass of the cup in front of me, I can see a distorted image of Peeta's hands. Clenched fists. Burn scars are less of a contrast on his skin than mine, but I can see them. Everything that's been done to him. 

And Prim. My amazing little sister is as dead today as she would have been if I'd never stood up for her. As if her life was too insignificant to fight for. Everything I can see flickers through the heat of the rage that has rekindled inside me.

“I vote yes,” I hear myself say. 

“Excellent,” Coin says instantly. “I'll make this solution public just minutes from now. Again, your individual votes will remain confidential. I'm glad to have your support in resolving this problem. Now, let's go out to the plaza.”

I leave the rose where it is when I get up from the table. I don't want it after all. There's a roaring in my ears. No one looks at me and no one says anything else.

We probably look impressive, fanning out in the wake of the President as we enter the plaza, where everything is bleached of color under the weak winter sun. We probably look like we are soldiers on the side of justice. The City Circle is jammed wall to wall with people and the entire space electrifies with cheering when we enter. Some people look like they live here and are eager to show that they're participating in the new regime. Some have very hard faces. Some are still bandaged or leaning on crutches. There are not many children that I can see. The victors file to one side of the stage, Coin to the other, where she ascends to a balcony. Below and in front of her is positioned a plain solid post. 

I recollect that Effie told me to stand on some kind of mark, so I look around the paving stones and find a spot across from the post. I have to walk away from the other victors to reach it and I find that I am isolated and uncomfortably close to the post. It reminds me of the gallows in District Twelve. I keep facing it, remembering Effie's instructions to keep my profile to the crowd.

Snow is marched out amid a whole lot of guards. The crowd's voice changes, splitting into growls and shrieks. The hands that were spread in the air just a moment ago turn into fists and a few scuffles happen as people claw toward Snow. I can see them on the massive screens hanging on the walls of the buildings that hem us all in. Snow is safe within his platoon of guards, though. They stand him in front of the post and handcuff him to it. 

No wonder that they didn't have me rehearse, that they left me in the hospital till yesterday night. He's barely ten yards away. I'd have to be as drunk as Haymitch to miss.

Coin reads out a proclamation, or perhaps it's Snow's sentence — I'm only half listening, enough to know that she isn't saying anything about the Hunger Games. Beneath the echo of her magnified voice, I look around and think, here's her arena to preside over. I do indeed know the truth, and it's that nothing at all has changed, or if it has it's only gotten worse. It was all for nothing. And it is all happening again. 

This is so unjust, so unfair, that I can feel it humming inside me the way the bow hums in my hands. This is the rage that Gale lives by, that to me feels only like the promise of death. I stand there in the costume Cinna created for me, with a weapon designed to be irresistible to me, in front of all these people, waiting to kill a man so I can give them what they want to see. 

I want out, I think. I want my little sister back. They don't own me. 

I can't take back what I've done but I can stop cooperating. It'll cost me — it'll cost me whatever freedom I have, and my sanity if I live very long at all, and it'll cost my mother her other daughter — but I can choose something else.

Snow is looking at me, but when I meet his gaze he looks out at the crowd instead. I can see that he is having to work to breathe, and that red bubbles are forming on his puffy lips. 

Coin's echoing voice comes to a pause, and the entire crowd hushes with her. She says, “Let the sentence be carried out.”

On cue, I reach back and pull the single arrow from my quiver. I draw my bow and aim. I let them all take a good long look. 

Then I shift upward to a target of my own choosing and release my arrow. And Coin crumples over the balcony wall and crashes to the paving stones, dead, with my arrow in her eye.

There is a moment of silent confusion, then a buzz ripples through the crowd. Snow has turned his gaze from Coin's body to me and he is laughing, head thrown back, snake eyes crinkled, blood foaming from his mouth even as he continues to laugh. I hear heavy footsteps start toward me and then they are lost in the roar of the crowd and the echoing in my ears. 

“Goodnight,” I whisper to my bow, and I can feel its hum in my palm cease. At the same time I bend my head to Cinna's last gift to me — the nightlock pill in its hidden pocket on my shoulder. My teeth sink down not on fabric but on flesh. 

The hand on my shoulder drags me around. Peeta. It's his blood on my teeth, his hand blocking the way to my final escape. His eyes on mine. The guards on his heels push past him to grab me and they trip on Peeta's crutches and we all pile to the ground. My nightlock tears from my clothes under Peeta's unyielding hold and I see the fabric flutter away, the pill crushed under yet another guard's boot. I begin to scream, twisting and flailing, hitting anyone I can reach, transformed into a wild creature in a trap. My bow is gone and I have only my body to fight with. The guards drag me up, lift me in the air, and I can see the entire crowd surging forward, and myself on the massive screens surrounding the plaza. 

“Gale!” I scream, over and over, knowing he will know what I'm asking, knowing that wherever he is, he can see me and he's armed. But no shot arrives. Well, I didn't do it for him either, though it would have delivered both of us from a lot of grief. 

The guards nearly lose me twice before they get me inside. They have to slam me to the paving stones and twist me up in the air again. I can feel the new skin on the back of my neck begin to shred. They put handcuffs around my wrists and ankles and a sack over my head and then they have an easier time of it. They wrestle me down flights of stairs and push me into a smallish echoing room and onto the floor. Off come the shackles and the sack and before I can launch myself at them, they're gone. Heavy bolts turn in the door behind them.

I push against the door but there is no give. I can't even hear anything after the bolts. I sag against the door and turn to see where they've left me.

My new surroundings are like a stripped-down version of the room I left earlier this morning. There's a window, but it's just a glazed strip at the top of the wall, like in our old quarters in Thirteen. The walls and floor are finished, but the bed is just a bare plastic mattress. There's a minimal bathroom at one side. I am totally confused. I know the Capitol has real prison cells. Was this room some sort of halfway zone for people Snow was only trying to frighten? Or were my fellow victors pulled out of a special prison just for people from the districts, or for people they planned to hold a long time?

It doesn't matter. I need to let all of that go. The past is over and I've made a choice I can live with. Or rather, die with. My only task now is to figure out the manner of my suicide.

There is nothing I can work with in the room, which doesn't surprise me at all. No fabric, no chemicals, no electrical outlets. I look at the shower for awhile, trying to think of a way to drown myself before guards would intervene, but I can't think of anything. I'm sure that I'm under some kind of surveillance, though I can't identify where it might be, and so whatever I choose will need to be fast. There is nothing in the remaining pockets of my Mockingjay costume. The reinforced fabric and armored panels are too tough to tear into strips and too flexible to cut myself with. My boots don't have laces. I take off my pin and look at it, wondering what I could do with it, but in the end I conclude that the Gamemakers were right the first time around: this thing isn't a weapon. Not unless I wanted to stab myself in the eye. 

After a couple of days of total solitude, I'm half considering it. Food is delivered through some kind of revolving compartment in the door. I can't jimmy the compartment from my side. Empty dishes and uneaten food disappear mysteriously while I am in the bathroom. The dishes are all floppy paper and not worth trying to keep, and there are never any utensils so I have to eat with my hands. Probably makes an entertaining image for whoever's keeping an eye on me. The other thing that makes for a good spectacle is that after the first day, there is no little paper cup of medicines for dessert. I learn the hard way that I've been on some kind of decent-sized dose of morphling all along. At first I just feel terrible. As it gets to be too late, I think of Johanna back in our shared room in Thirteen, swearing and retching and shaking. At least I know what's coming. 

When I come back to my senses, more or less, I find that my once-beautiful costume is so disgusting that I have no choice but to finally take it off and take a shower. The blood that I shed out on the plaza that morning, I no longer know how many days ago, is mixed into layers of sweat and grime. The fabric has stuck to oozing places where my new skin abraded away as I fought and has yet to get enough air to heal. Despite the pain, I huddle in the bottom of the shower for longer than I intend to, and when I get out, my Mockingjay costume is gone just like the empty dishes. Even the pin is gone. On the bed is a folded gown of a papery material like the one I wore in the hospital, as useless for my aims as everything else I can lay my hands on. I put it on but I still feel naked. 

Lying on the mattress, staring into space, I reach the conclusion that a fast death is not going to be available to me. I will have to stop eating.

This proves to be harder than I could ever have guessed. I know how to handle hunger. But I don't really know how to give up. Some days I think they send in food that smells especially amazing just to drive me crazy, to break what's left of my will. Some days I do break down and let myself have a bite or two. I decide to continue drinking water because that seems like a reasonable compromise to make with myself. I start wondering whether they're spiking my water with nutrients. I have no idea why they could be waiting so long to execute me. To give myself a way to pass the time in a manner that might help me starve faster, I do some of the exercises that Peeta made Haymitch and me go along with, a thousand years ago before the Quarter Quell. The exercises feel terrible on my skin, which seems to have stopped healing. But at least they burn energy. Most of the time, though, I lie on the mattress and watch the strip of window go dark and light, frost over, and fill with snow. 

In time, I can no longer do the exercises. I have to hang onto the wall to get to the bathroom. One day it's easier to lie still than to get up for water to drink. I stay on my bed and watch the daylight fade.

In the darkness, I am not lost, because Prim is a light to guide my way.


	2. Try to be kind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Katniss's trial and return to District Twelve.

↔ Try to be kind ↔ 

But I open my eyes again, after all. I'm back in the hospital. Strapped down and snaked with tubes and drips. I would cry if there were anything left in me. They can only be saving me so that they can force me to do it all again. 

Against my will, I come back to alertness, even to a minimal bit of strength. No one talks to me. This is fine. Even on the day when they unhook me from the last of the drips, put me in regular clothes — actually, kind of nice clothes — as well as handcuffs, and seat me in a wheelchair, they do not say why. I'd rather not know.

It's Haymitch who arrives to wheel me out of the hospital room, along with a whole squad of guards. They all take me to an underground garage and put me in a car. The windows are tinted and it bothers me not to be able to see where I am — that is, until we arrive above ground and I catch shadowy glimpses of masses of people, mobbing forward, trying to stare in the windows only to be pushed back by armed guards. 

I must have quite the expression on my face, because Haymitch finally speaks to me. “Do you know where we're going, sweetheart?”

I shake my head. I'm pretty sure my voice doesn't work anymore.

“Yesterday was the final day of your trial. Today is the sentencing and you're required by law to be there to hear that in person.” 

He's watching to see if I get it, but I just feel a sense of dissatisfaction. I can't see why they would have held a trial for me, because it isn't like it's hard to tell what I've done. I wonder if they will finally execute me today. Maybe what he means is that they have to read my sentence aloud like they did with Snow. I don't see why they needed to put me back in the hospital beforehand. Maybe instead, they will sentence me to continue acting for them in some way — something to do with propos, or with the new Hunger Games — and they plan to hijack me in order to make me do it, so they needed to get me in better health first. I'll have to finish myself off before that can happen. I look down at my hands and pull the cuffs hard against my wrists. 

Back up through another underground garage and into a courtroom. The crush of people inside is appalling and I find that my body is trying to bolt of its own volition. Haymitch and the guards have to frog-march me inside and I struggle to stay in my seat and ignore the noise coming at me. Think of the first reaping, I tell myself. Look bored.

There are some formalities at the beginning of the court session and this is how I learn that Paylor is the new, and elected, President of Panem. I feel an unexpected prick of interest. Things could be worse, for the survivors, and for my own peace of mind at what I've left in my wake. I liked her all right. She was there when I found Snow in the rose room, and she heard what he said. Maybe she won't become like either Snow or Coin.

My sentencing does involve reading aloud, but it doesn't take very long. It seems they all agree that I am guilty of killing Coin, which it's good to see that there hasn't been a mass break with reality, but they have concluded that I did it out of extreme mental disorientation and can't be held criminally responsible for my actions. My head doctor seems to have learned a lot about me while napping because he has explained to them that I'm a shell-shocked, broken girl to whom every single moment is a matter of life and death. So, my sentence is to continue being cared for by a head doctor, and to protect the public from myself by staying in District Twelve from now on.

I have to repeat all these statements to myself over and over because it's hard to believe they're true. My name is Katniss Everdeen. I am still seventeen years old. My home is District Twelve. I am to go home and live there.

I don't see how the public in District Twelve is at all protected by this arrangement, but maybe it's just assumed that they're used to me there. Then I remember that no one lives in Twelve anymore. I'm thinking of bringing this up to someone, and in fact the judges ask me to stand and acknowledge my sentence if I understand it. But in the time it takes to struggle to my feet, I wear myself out and can only manage to repeat, “I understand.” 

That's it, then. One of the judges bangs a gavel, which causes me to jump — another great moment in public — and that noise is just the opening salvo as the crowd all starts talking and pushing toward me again. My knees give out and I land back in my chair beside Haymitch. He looks around and signals to somebody, and the guard on my other side is undoing my handcuffs, and then they lift me to my feet and walk me out of the room before the crush of people can arrive. We are going fast, staying mostly ahead of them while the guards push a few back, out toward what has to be the main entrance of the building. The doors are thrown open to the winter sun and there are crowds out there too. This is all too similar to the last time I was in sunlight, when we went out to a plaza full of roaring people and tied Snow to a post. I freeze on the verandah as the guards start pushing people back, clearing a path down the steps. Haymitch and I have a death grip on each other.

Then someone comes to my other side. Of all people. It's Johanna. She gives me a hard look and then puts her arm around me. More people are falling into place around us as Haymitch and Johanna walk me down the steps. In front of me, like a guard of honor, are Peeta and Enobaria. Peeta is walking with a cane but I know just by the set of their backs that nobody would mess with either of them. I glance over my shoulder and find Beetee and Annie following us, their eyes watchfully on the crowd. Annie looks tougher and more alert than I've ever seen her.

The sunlight is too bright. I'm not used to this anymore. My eyes are welling up and my heart is pounding. 

The path lined by guards leads us to a space roped off from the crowd, at the center of which is a hovercraft, where Plutarch Heavensbee is waiting, looking, as usual, pleased as punch. He seems all ready to usher us aboard but Haymitch waves him off. 

Johanna says in my ear, “Well, goodbye.” I look over at her, startled. She backs up a step and says, “Listen, brainless, don't do anything to make them regret letting you go.” She comes back at me and gives me a hug, then steps away. She doesn't seem to have expected me to say anything. 

There's a little pause and one by one the others come up to me. Enobaria, with an air of getting this over with, steps up and shakes my hand (possibly harder than necessary) and says, “Goodbye, Katniss.” Then she goes over to the side to stand by Johanna, who looks at her in irritation.

Beetee shakes my hand too and says, “I'm glad you get to go home. Take care of yourself.” I'm relieved I don't have to say anything in return. 

Annie hugs me so gently that I'm afraid she'll make me cry. She strokes my hair and says, “Thank you for everything. Thank you for being there for Finnick. Thank you for my wedding dress. I hope I'll see you again. Do you think you'll let me know if you want me to visit you?” She pulls back and looks at me and I feel obligated to answer her. 

I have to swallow a couple times and my voice is still raspy. “Am I allowed to have people visit me?”

She looks at Haymitch. Behind me, he says, “Sure.”

“Okay,” I tell her, not really sure what I'm committing to, but she looks hopeful and kisses my cheek and goes to stand with the others. 

I look back at Haymitch then, ready to go, but he isn't looking at me, he's looking at Peeta. When I meet his eyes I know. 

Of course this is how it would happen: in public, far too quickly. Of course this is the way we will finally let each other go.

I have to look away, anywhere but at him, and I glimpse on Johanna's face an expression I've seen before, the same fury that she and a lot of the other victors had right before the Quarter Quell interviews. When she came up to me and straightened my necklace. When Peeta and I were standing there in our wedding clothes before being sent to die. 

I turn back to Peeta in despair. I haven't talked to him for what must be months. I don't know how he is. I don't know whether he thinks I'm insane. All I know is that I want more than anything for him to put his arms around me and that must be the last thing he wants. He's looking at me like he can't be sure he knows who I am.

He sounds as if he's at least trying to be kind when he says, “I might go back to Twelve later. I don't know yet.” 

I try to look like I believe him. “Okay,” I choke out. 

He nods. “Okay.”

Better just to say it. My eyes are spilling over. “Goodbye,” I tell him.

He does come toward me then, but doesn't touch me. “Don't say that.” 

But there's nothing else to say. Not even he has anything else to say. 

Haymitch takes my arm and guides me a step or two away, toward the ramp up into the hovercraft. Peeta looks at me for a moment, and then walks away — not to the other victors, just straight away across the landing space and back into the crowd.

I don't even remember taking off. I just sort of find myself in a seat, staring out a window down at land that I don't recognize, with Plutarch across from me burbling away about something. Haymitch is sitting next to me with a drink in his hand. I eye it and wonder if I should have some myself.

Plutarch seems to be spending his time overseeing some sort of logistics having to do with supplies getting transferred among the districts. Haymitch may or may not have any interest in this — he grunts at approximately the right places in Plutarch's monologue, but never asks any questions. Eventually, when Plutarch notices I'm paying some amount of attention, he switches topics into what is apparently a pet project that he wants to set up. This is to give the people of Panem the quality entertainment they're accustomed to having by starting some kind of televised talent competition. He's trying to persuade me to sign on to a singing show. “Come now, Katniss, everyone is eager to hear your voice again! And in a completely harmless, happy circumstance, I assure you!” I'm very near to asking Haymitch for that drink when the pilots announce that we're landing in Three in a minute. 

Plutarch gets to his feet. “This is my stop, dear girl, but I'll be getting back to you about singing! I don't think the people will take no for an answer!” I stare resolutely out the window and Haymitch waves him off yet again. He seems totally undaunted. 

After we've been airborne again for awhile, and I've managed to relax a bit with no further pressure to do anything for anybody, it occurs to me to ask Haymitch why he's coming with me to Twelve. 

He shrugs. “They couldn't find anything for me to do anywhere else.” 

I mull this over and come to the conclusion that he's lying to me. “If you wanted to do something somewhere else you would just go do it.”

He studies the glass in his hand and hunts around for the bottle. “Maybe so.”

“Are you supposed to stay in Twelve and keep an eye on me?”

“I don't have to, but that's the plan for now.” He sounds annoyed. Either it's me or it's the fact that he's just poured out the last of the bottle.

I let my thoughts wander. The liquor and all the things that Haymitch blots out with it. Why he would be herding me around when guards could do that and he could look after Peeta instead. Then it occurs to me that guards haven't been the ones supervising me for my entire life. 

“Haymitch. My mother isn't coming back to Twelve, is she?”

“No.”

I sort of want to ask where she is, or how she is, but maybe I don't want to know. The last time I saw her, she was sitting blankly by my bedside in the recovery ward. 

I blink and discover that Haymitch is holding something out to me. A paper envelope. I look at the neat handwriting on it — my name and nothing else. “That's from her. To read when you're settled in.”

I don't know what he means by settled in, but apparently he feels he's said his piece because he gets up and spends the rest of the flight hunting around lots of compartments in the hovercraft for small bottles of liquor. He stashes everything he finds in his bag and sits down again looking pleased. I pretend to be dozing for some of this time, then switch to watching out the window as the land below us grows wrinkly and pitted, glowing with a coat of snow that briefly turns orange as the sun goes down.

We land shortly after nightfall just outside the Victor's Village. Lights are on in most of the houses and there's a smell of woodsmoke and cooking. Three houses are dark. 

Haymitch escorts me to my empty house, sits me down in my mother's rocking chair beside the hearth, and lights a fire. “Sae'll be over to make sure you get some supper,” he says, and then he's gone, with his bag clinking beside him. Off to his own dark house. I wonder how long it'll take him to get through that liquor, and if I'll see him at all before the lack of it drives him out in search of more. 

Greasy Sae lets herself in. She's holding a covered pot and has her granddaughter in tow, the one who lives in her own little world. “There's our girl,” she says by way of greeting, and plunks the pot down on the stove. 

Before she can light the burner underneath, I find my voice enough to say, “I don't think I can eat anything right now.” 

She looks at me. “Beef stew, you know.”

I try to explain but I'm mute. She comes over and studies my face at close range. “I'll put it in the icebox for later. Maybe try something else tomorrow.” 

After that I sit alone in the dark.

But she does come back, day after day, usually with food suitable to an invalid, sometimes with things a little more exciting. I wonder whether she's on somebody's payroll or just being neighborly. 

I live in the rocking chair, more or less, getting up only to go to the bathroom that's off the kitchen. The phone rings sometimes and the letter from my mother starts gathering dust on the mantelpiece, but I can't bring myself to be bothered about either one. It occurs to me after some days to change my clothes, but navigating the stairs takes half the morning. Last time I was on stairs I was going down and practically being carried by Haymitch and Johanna. The time before that, by guards. The time before that, leaving Tigris's cellar. I still don't understand how I got from there to here. 

I don't understand why I'm living. And I had no intention at all of complying with my sentence no matter what it turned out to be. What am I waiting for? 

Once upstairs, I feel like an intruder. We slept up here. For a few months after the first Games, even though I had nightmares, I slept up here and believed that everything might turn out okay. Panting on the way out of my room, struggling to keep a grip on my armful of clothes, I take the extra time before crawling back downstairs to close the doors to my mother's room and to Prim's.

Anyway, I manage to start eating again, though not all that much. I haven't had solid food since my prison cell, and I was trying not to eat what I had then, so things are complicated. Greasy Sae is patient with me, though she has to take back to her place plenty of things I can't finish. But her cooking is home food, at least, and it's made from decent meat even though it's the end of winter. All the meat is livestock — seems like nobody in Twelve has taken up hunting. 

I mention this to Greasy Sae at some point and she replies, “I take it you haven't looked in the hall closet.” So I get out of my chair and wobble over there to see what she's talking about. 

Hanging in the closet is my father's hunting jacket. I stare at it for awhile, then step in so that I can touch it, and I trip on something bulky on the floor of the closet. I thump down beside it and pull on the strings. My game bag. Filled with the things I brought to Thirteen to make it seem like it could be home. The things that Gale brought into the bunker. All except Buttercup and the pearl that Peeta gave me. The pearl burned up with half my skin in the City Circle. Leaning against the wall behind the jacket is my own bow, my real bow. I don't really want to know who thought to bring these things back to my house. Gale is likely, but I can't wrap my mind around owing him a debt. Not now.

When Greasy Sae goes home, I get up off the floor and take my father's jacket back to my rocking chair. I put the jacket over me and fall asleep. 

When I try to envision myself going hunting as if everything were back like it was, I just can't picture it. For starters, I would have to go out of my house and a fair number of people would probably see me. I don't know how many, but it would be too many. From Greasy Sae's occasional chitchat and the general noises I hear day to day, I've pieced together that the Victor's Village serves as kind of a home base for the people who have come back to District Twelve. The work of rebuilding is underway now that the spring is arriving, and until they can get more houses built and have more people come back, everyone lives in the nine houses that aren't assigned to a living victor. I doubt that Haymitch and other people could be made to live together, so I assume he's still the only one in his house. If he has houseguests, they are probably working the fastest toward rebuilding.

There are rations, so I wouldn't be helping to feed anyone by going hunting, either. There's no reason to do it. 

But I wake up before dawn — I don't know why, possibly a nightmare, possibly the fact that the embers smoldering in the fireplace look like something I once wore. I stir beneath the jacket and find that there's a thaw in the air, even this early. No one else is going to be up. I stumble out of the chair and pull on the jacket and extra socks and my old boots. Somewhere in me are the habits that remember where we keep a canteen and which gloves had yet to get holes in them. I pull on a hat and let myself out of the house into the lightening darkness. 

By the time I reach the Meadow, I am out of breath and weak-kneed and I have to admit that, even though I haven't seen anyone else to feel stupid in front of, this was a stupid idea. The Meadow is the only place that never ended up strewn with rubble, so it's where they've been burying the dead. Boards and flat stones stand upright throughout the disturbed earth, in narrowly spaced rows. I falter for awhile, then pick my way around the edge and cross into the forest. But once I'm in I can't shake the last time I was here and I have to sit down with my back against a black walnut tree. 

The woods come alive around me with the dawn. Birds perch on budding twigs and deafen me with their songs. Squirrels whose stores have run low are out looking for food. I sit with my bow next to me and figure there's no point in even stringing it. Better to get them when they're fatter. A vole runs across the toe of my boot. 

When I first hear a snatch of melody, I wonder briefly if I've sunk into waking nightmares. But then I see the mockingjay perched above me, feathers gleaming in the sun in the way that shows that the black sections have color in them after all. I stare at it, wondering if it sings this song all the time or if somehow it recognizes me. I open my mouth and find myself singing back to it. “Are you, are you coming to the tree.”

I stop, feeling sick, but it's encouraged enough to pick up the melody again. I rinse my mouth with a sip of water from the canteen and sing “The Hanging Tree” with the mockingjay. 

More jays arrive and sing among themselves until I think of a song that didn't end up banned in my house, and sing that for them to get them started on something else. Then another, and another. Nothing nice — I can't find anything but tales of scorched-earth revenge and heartsickness, stuff that used to be thrilling and incomprehensible. I spend all day underneath that tree singing to mockingjays. When the temperature starts dropping along with the sun, I figure that they'll be roosting soon anyway and I struggle to my feet.

I forgot that there might be people out in the Meadow. Half a dozen are out there with shovels, plus kerchiefs over their noses and mouths. They seem to be filling in graves. Probably they wouldn't be starting new ones so late in the day. They look up when I appear at the edge of the field, and I hesitate, but they just wave or tip their hats and go back to work. 

Of course they knew I was out there. They could hear the singing.

I suspect, as I make my way back through what was town, that word got around today, because nobody acts at all surprised to see me out and about. Nobody seems to be looking to see what game I have available, either, even though I'm carrying my bow. I am very slow getting back home. When I get inside, Greasy Sae is already there with a pot of soup steaming on the stove. She sits me at the kitchen table and I manage to put away a bowl. 

I do this for the next couple days — I also sleep a little better — but it wears me out and I go back to the broth and rocking chair approach to my life. But in between sessions of being unable to see anything other than Prim's burning body and the walls of my prison cell, I pick my head up a bit and find that I miss the cool early spring air and the sight of other people. We'd all started sort of nodding and murmuring hello and it made me think of the old days. 

I think in a mystified way about this much younger version of me. Not even two years ago. The old me loved this time of year — it was still lean pickings but there was the promise of food in the future, of regrowth. 

At least, that's how it felt out in the woods, though in town there was still just the same grinding poverty, glazed over with patches of slushy coal-dusted snow. 

District Twelve is still full of coal dust, but nobody's adding to it anymore. During my few days of trudging back and forth, I've observed that the work of finding and burying bodies seems to be almost done. The streets are clear and I can see that the remains of the buildings are being systematically checked. The ruins that have been marked as clear are being torn down by some kind of digging or demolishing machine that I've never seen in Twelve before. Pretty much anything that isn't coal mining got done by hand.

When I've climbed back out of my stupor, it's some afternoon, too late to go out to the woods. I go into town anyway and wander down the line of buildings that are still partially standing until I get some clues to where I am and which one I'm looking for. The Mayor's house isn't far from where the demolition line is now, so it and its neighbors are full of people poking around, checking for salvageable items or materials. 

A man I sort of recognize comes out with his hands full of droopy silverware and puts them in a bin next to some charred piano keys. “Hey, Katniss,” he says to me. 

I'm startled but fortunately his name surfaces out of the depths of my brain. “Hey, Thom,” I say hoarsely. I clear my throat, then wonder what it matters if I sound like a hermit, seeing as I do act like one. I gesture to the house behind him. “Did they find anyone in there?”

He turns to look but I think it might be just so he doesn't have to look at me when he answers. “Quite a few people. As I recall, they reckoned it must be the family plus either the folks that worked for them or people who'd come over to watch the Games. Maybe both.” Then he seems extra awkward, like he's just remembered that he was watching the Games too, which means watching me.

I just nod as if I can ignore this. But I feel like I have to explain. “She was my friend, you know. Madge Undersee. She's the one that gave me the mockingjay pin.” 

Thom is looking at me like this is the saddest thing he's heard in a long time. Stop talking, brainless, I tell myself. But he just says, “Do you still have that pin?”

I swallow. “No.”

“Oh.” This seems to make him feel even sadder. 

“I'm going to head back home,” I tell him, and make my escape. I glance back as I turn the corner, and I see an awful lot of people coming over to him.

I look in the mirror when I get home, wondering what I look like to them. To me, I resemble the reflection of myself I saw in the glass dividing me from Peeta in the hovercraft that pulled us out of the first arena. A feral animal. There's also something of the lost, distracted look I saw in a lot of the other victors — Wiress with her mad circling, Woof confused over the edible insects station, Cecelia with the ghosts of her children beside her. I remember thinking that my instincts would be to protect them, if only everything I wanted didn't depend upon their deaths. I stare at the hollow-cheeked girl, wondering if I can find it in me to be at all kind to her. Treat her like a human being. Sit her down in the shallows and give her a decent task to do. Just in case her death isn't necessary after all.

If I change my mind, later, then I can probably find nightlock.

So the following day I go out and ignore the mockingjays until they lose interest. I'm incapable of climbing a tree — I'm practically crippled, not just by muscle loss but also by the scars that pull with each swing of a leg or arm — so I find a good brush-screened crook between trees and settle in. When I come back through town I have three squirrels in my bag and a small spring turkey in my hand. I have to keep switching the turkey from hand to hand as my arms tire out. Some kind of cheer goes up along the demolition line when they see me and all of a sudden I have people bidding on my game. This makes me feel better about the turkey because a turkey was the last thing that Gale brought back from our woods. But I feel okay about the whole day now. I sell off the entire turkey and two of the squirrels and keep one for myself. Greasy Sae puts it in tonight's stew after her little granddaughter and I roast it on a skewer over the fire. It's good. It's like home. 

But I wake up vomiting that night, convinced that it wasn't three squirrels and a turkey, but Rue and Mags and Thresh and the morphling addict from District Six, and that I somehow failed to notice their eyes before I shot them. 

When Greasy Sae arrives in the morning, I screw up the nerve to ask her if the game made anyone else sick, but she looks at me like I've got two heads and says, “You kidding me? People loved it. They're all asking me if you're well enough to keep going out in the woods.”

In this way I keep trying, day after day, to perform the smallest, emptiest possible version of what my life was before the Games. I hunt and sell my take. I come back with a bunch of ramps and nettles held out in front of me like a bouquet. Piece by piece, I carry out some wood and nails and a hammer and build myself a couple of low tree stands in places where I'll get a good take if I can just get off the ground. I have to sit the game bag across my shoulders carefully because even there my skin has never really healed right. I have more nightmares about mutts, which I accommodate by allowing myself one day off hunting and then forcing myself to go back out. 

I try offering to help with the cleanup on my days off, but no one will give me anything to do. On bad days I think it's because they think I'm crazy, or because they think I can't do any real work but can only put on a costume and makeup and do fake work. On better days I can manage to understand that they think I've gone through enough.


	3. A civil word

↔ A civil word ↔ 

Apparently I missed it the first couple times around but a train arrives in District Twelve every two weeks, bearing all kinds of stuff. Lumber, clothing, televisions, rations of food from every part of Panem. It still seems to be the case that the pretty things from District One do not have any customers in Twelve, but that's the only sector of goods that I see missing. I guess the other districts must have things from everyplace except Twelve, because nobody's mining coal here and we don't have anything else to export. I don't know what they're using to generate electricity. The power has stayed on most of the time.

I finally see Haymitch. He's heading away from the train station with a wheelbarrow piled high with boxes and crates. There is a massive commotion coming from the crates, but that doesn't seem to be the cause of the look on his face. I recognize his expression as the special annoyance that is prompted only by sobriety. 

I fall into step beside him but he doesn't interrupt the steady flow of cursing under his breath to give me any kind of greeting. I eyeball the crates. Through narrow slats, I can see a shifting mass of orange beaks and white feathers. The honking is deafening. Under the crates, I can see the edges of a few labels that show that the boxes are cases of liquor. 

I have to ask. “What's with the geese?”

He curses a little louder and says, “Gonna raise 'em. We need more homegrown food around here.”

“Haymitch, you want some geese, I'll shoot you some geese.”

He grunts. “Not for eating, girl, for the eggs.”

“Oh, are they all females?”

“Most of 'em. Or so I'm told. Like I know anything about geese. They're supposed to be easy to look after.”

My eye goes back to the cases of liquor. “They'd better be.”

He sees where I'm looking. “Easier than you, I'll tell you.”

“You haven't seen me for a month, Haymitch, you're not fooling anybody.”

“Neither are you. If you'd get to these damn village meetings they hold you'd see me and you'd have something to do, you know.” 

I don't even know what he's talking about. “They'd assign me livestock?”

“Just show up back at the station tonight at seven. Always the night while the train's here. You'll learn something.” The wheelbarrow hits a loose stone and he goes back to cursing under his breath. 

I can't think of any good reason not to go, so that evening after supper I walk with Greasy Sae and her granddaughter to the train station. This is the new station and it must have been practically the first thing anybody got done in Twelve — tear out the burnt station and put up a new one. I guess the meetings are here because it's the only place big enough for everyone. 

Apparently this is how the district goes about its business without a Mayor and without the Capitol. Everyone sits in more or less a circle with two or three raggedy rows of chairs and room for people to wander around behind them and stretch their legs. A couple of people sort of keep things moving and take notes on the same sort of slates we used to have at school, but nobody appears to be in charge. Haymitch relays some information from Plutarch about supply transfers but I think that's because they know each other, not because they're exactly working together. My old neighbor Leevy talks about the school materials that just arrived on this train, enough for the handful of kids around. Everyone reviews the progress on the burials and demolition and talks about how soon construction can start. I guess there's kind of a problem with funding — there's some pool of money granted from the Capitol but it won't last forever and they can't decide how to portion it out. I'm feeling bored and thinking about whether I'll be able to find any decent greens in the woods yet when somebody says my name. 

I look up to find everybody staring at me. I can't even tell who said my name. There probably isn't a graceful way out of this. “Sorry, I was thinking about something else.”

Thom kind of smiles and says, “That's okay. I just wanted to say that I'm glad you're able to start coming to the village meetings because, well, a few people have thought of the fact that you might be in a position to help.”

I try to remember what exactly they were talking about. “I don't know how I would know how to divide up the money.”

“Well, we'd all work together on it.”

I must look totally confused because Haymitch chimes in from across the circle, “He's talking about your money, Katniss.” 

I'm extra confused. “What money?”

“Your victor's winnings. If there's anything here you might want to do with them.”

I feel horribly awkward. “But didn't they take those away?”

“What now?”

Why am I having this conversation with Haymitch by hollering across a room in front of at least a hundred people? “Don't you think they took those away? I mean, as a punishment?”

“Girl, were you even listening to your sentence? Was that anywhere in there?”

I stare at him. I sort of meant to refer to when I became the Mockingjay, not when I assassinated the President, but he's getting his point across in his usual way. I try to remember exactly how much a victor's winnings add up to. “If they have all that money to give away, why aren't they using it for this kind of stuff?” I wave my hands at the room.

People shift around uncomfortably. Haymitch is totally fed up with me.

“Oh,” I say, listening to what I just said. “Um …” I turn back to Thom, who's looking like he'd rather talk about something else now. “Um, can I go look at that and … talk to you again tomorrow?”

“Yes that's fine,” he says immediately. “That'll be good. Okay. Who's got the next topic?”

I slouch home from the meeting in a state of advanced embarrassment, trying to hide behind Greasy Sae as we flow along the general migration back from the train station to the Victor's Village. This does not work terribly well due to the fact that, although she's considerably broader than me, she's even shorter than I am. I also try to appear absorbed in my surroundings, but this gradually turns into more than an act. I'm looking around with a new perspective, even in the dark lit only by a waxing moon. Maybe I could do something good. I mean, other than bring people food, which they don't really need me for anymore. Maybe I'm not just a force for destruction.

My mother used to manage the money, back when all three of us lived in this house. When I get home I go to the fireplace and look at the envelope on the mantel. It's dusty now. I trace over my name in the dust. Then I take the letter up to my bedroom. I've been sleeping up here sometimes and it isn't the end of the world. I get into bed and turn on a little lamp. We used candles half the time, even after we moved here, because it's what we were used to. But the lamp is not bad. I put my finger under the flap and unfold the letter. 

When I'm done reading I don't see how I can do anything else but go back downstairs and call her. She wrote out her number for me. I was supposed to call her, and to read the letter, when I first arrived back in Twelve. I bundle the blankets around me and pad down into the study, my feet arching against the cold floor, and I eye the phone for a minute until I remember how to dial it.

I guess it isn't as late as it feels to me, because she answers, or maybe it's so late at night that she's finally home. She starts to cry when she hears my voice and I surprise myself by starting to cry too. I forgot that Prim's voice had been starting to sound like hers. 

She wants to hear about what I do every day, and I try to explain to her in a way that will let her know that I'm improving. She tells me that she's doing what she had still been only planning when she wrote the letter, to go to District Four and help set up a hospital. She went there with Annie and helps look after her. Annie is pregnant and very happy about it. This makes my heart hurt a bit. I don't know whether to feel happy or sad for her.

When I get around to explaining that I'm calling now because I wanted to talk to her about my winnings and whether she would help me figure out what to do with them, it's a long moment before she replies. And she says she'll help me — in fact, she starts helping right away by explaining how I can make a phone call to the bank to find out how much money there is, and by giving me suggestions on what to talk about when I go find Thom tomorrow. But something in her voice is withdrawing. And something in me just has too much trouble being nice if I've got even the slightest reason not to. The conversation ends up stumbling to a halt and we make a show of agreeing that we'd surely talk longer if only it weren't so late at night, and we'll talk again soon for sure.

I'm lying awake, watching the moon's progress across my window, before I piece it together that she thinks I might never have called her at all if it weren't for the money. And I try to find a way to argue against this, but I can't find anything convincing. I get angrier and angrier, mostly at myself. Then I realize, she said that she moved to Four with Annie. Annie, who was still in the Capitol the day I was sentenced — who helped walk me back out into daylight and into whatever freedom I have now. But my mother didn't come walk beside me that day. And I'm something close to relieved to have a fresh reason to be angry at her instead of at myself. 

I go into town the next morning and find Thom at work. He collects a couple of other people and we go sit at the train station, our legs kicking off the already-empty platform in the sunshine, and they tell me the sorts of things that Twelve will probably need money for, and how much. They say that they know it's important to me to look after people who have hardship in their lives and I wonder why on earth they think this. Eventually I attribute it to the propos where I visited the wounded in different districts. Maybe they're also remembering how I tried to give away money when Twelve was being starved back before the Quarter Quell, even when there was nothing left to buy and victors weren't really allowed to give away winnings, because it was all I had. I use these memories to stifle my anger at my mother and I ask the questions she suggested, about how the money will be handled and so forth. 

We come to an agreement that I'll pay for prefabricated houses that you can buy from somewhere, and they'll sort out how many they want to get by the next village meeting so that they can send the order off with the next train. I'd already put myself to the trouble of doing the math about how many people must be living in each of the nine houses. They couldn't be more thrilled with me. They keep reassuring me that nobody's expecting anything of me, but they're really happy to have my support for the district and to follow my lead if there are projects I think are important. I feel awfully young and am repeatedly tempted to tell them they can just have my whole bank account.

I go to the woods after this meeting but I'm too distracted to hunt. Instead I thud to the ground in a patch of greens and start yanking them off the stems. Maybe I should've said no. Maybe I should go back and point out how hazardous and disappointing it is to depend on me, to accept anything from me. There must be a reason everyone in my life is gone. 

I try to tell myself that things are different now. Peacekeepers are not going to haul my neighbors up in front of a crowd and shoot them, and no one shrinks back into their doorways when I walk down the street. But I recognize that I had better go on bringing back game if I don't want all my conversations with my neighbors to revolve around what I'm paying for. All I've got today is greens but I can try to do better tomorrow. 

Word seems to get around about me and the houses, and I experience a general improvement in standing in Twelve. My personal improvement, on the other hand, is hampered by the fact that the dandelions have started flowering. In untrodden patches along the street, in the Meadow, in the green in the center of the Victor's Village. He told me he remembered that I picked a dandelion. I set to pulling off all the leaves and giving them to people for eating. Maybe next year not so many of them will grow back. I can only hope I will stop remembering.

On the day of the next train, I'm out in the woods checking my snare line — I finally talked myself into setting snares again — and with satisfaction I add my first two rabbits of the year to the rest of the day's take of some squirrels and a grouse. This is all a pretty good distraction from my worries over where the conversation might go at the village meeting tonight and what I'm supposed to say about the houses. On my way back I try to remember who might particularly like the rabbits. I have to skirt around the cars on the railroad tracks and come into town by a different angle.

The demolition line has finally reached the mercantile part of town. The last of the houses must have been pulled down while I was out today, and the first of the shops, what had been one of several used-goods stores, is coming down beneath the bulldozing machine. The demolition is usually a good show and there are plenty of people taking a break from the afternoon's salvaging work to stand at some distance and watch. I head for the crowd, my eyes scanning for my rabbit buyers.

Somebody straightens up from a salvage pile and takes a step backward onto the road right in front of me, so close that I nearly walk right into him. Then I stagger back. I think for a moment that I'm only seeing him because my brain is addled by the dandelions everywhere. 

Peeta is evidently as startled by me as I am by him. He glances around as if looking for clues as to where I came from. His eyes have lost that clouded, volatile appearance.

I gape for what feels like a whole minute, then say, “You could have told me you were coming.” 

My voice is louder and more agitated than I would have liked and I see a couple faces at the edge of the crowd turn in this direction. 

Peeta retorts, “You could pick up your phone once in awhile. Speaking of which, Dr. Aurelius says you have to answer sometime, because he can't keep pretending to counsel you forever.”

Oh nice. Great. Let's talk about how I'm the crazy one now. “So glad to hear you all still chat about me now that I'm gone.”

“Come on.” 

He's still looking startled and annoyed but I find I'm getting rapidly farther from caring. “Well don't tell me you came all the way here just to tell me to answer the phone.”

He seems to consider not explaining. “No, I came here for this.” He gestures and I realize that the salvage pile is stuff out of the bakery. The burned remnants of the building loom beside us.

“I showed you this. I got them to film this for you and I know you saw it. What do you need to come look at it for?” I recollect too late that he saw it shortly before being kicked bloody. 

A lot of people are looking at us now and the bulldozer has quieted to an idle. Peeta lowers his voice but that only makes him sound angrier. “This was my home too, you know.”

I just stare at him. I don't know what that's supposed to mean. I feel ambushed. I was pretty sure I'd never see him again and up till lately I'd been doing a decent job of not thinking about him. Maybe he'll just leave on the train tomorrow and I can go back to never seeing him again. “Oh really? So what's home now?”

He has no answer for this. I give him a dirty look and make to brush past him and continue on my way. He reaches out for me and I slap his hand away. Stupid move, really, because he's still much stronger than me and now he's got his hand locked around my wrist. I swallow and make myself hold still. I don't really think he'll hurt me, not anymore, but things don't need to get any worse out here on the street like this. I shouldn't have spoken to him like this. I look down at his hand on my sleeve. There's a scar around the knuckle of his thumb that can only be from me biting him instead of my pill of nightlock. 

The two moments are overlapping in my mind as I say, “Just let me go, okay?”

It's a moment before his grip loosens. I step away and keep backing up, slowly, my feet alert for any debris in the road behind me, for the remains of the gallows. He keeps his eyes on me and there is no warmth at all in the blue. 

My heart is pounding. “Peeta, maybe it'll be better if we don't talk.” 

He shakes his head slowly. “I didn't come here for you.”

When I turn my back on him, I see that the entire population of the street has dropped what they're doing to watch us. They don't even look away once I'm facing them. I might as well be on the television. To a person, they look crushed. Several women are muffling tears behind their hands, but the only thing I can hear is the rumble of the demolition machine.

I don't know how to deal with this. Forget the rabbits, forget everything. I make myself keep to a walk all the way to the end of the street. At the corner I risk a glance and see that Peeta has turned back to face the ruins of the bakery, but he's just standing there rigidly. I break into what passes for a run and don't stop until I'm slamming the door behind me in my own house. 

I can't settle to anything at home. I crash up and down the stairs and pace around in circles. I gut and skin my day's take with unsteady movements and barely manage to keep the entrails in a bowl instead of getting them all over the kitchen. I don't dare put my head out of doors to take them to the trash heap. I try to light a fire to roast the smaller game on and my hands are shaking so badly I can't even get a spark. Some victor I am. Some kind of victor. I wrap up the game and then just stand there and chew my nails down to the quick. I have a brainwave and I pull a wooden chair that we cracked and sort of intended to fix — back in the day when anything anywhere seemed like it had a hope of being fixed — I pull this out of the mudroom and start breaking it into kindling.

A sudden yowl, weirdly close by, startles me upright. Panting, I find myself face to face with a yellow-eyed cat that has materialized in my doorway. Matted and patchy fur, torn ear, a hind foot that he can't set on the ground, and skinny as a miner's sixth child, but there's no mistaking it: this is Buttercup.

Much later, Leevy told me how this went from where she stood on her front porch across the green, putting laundry on the line. The sun was starting to touch the tops of the trees and she was keeping an eye out for people in her house who would be heading home for supper. But the only two people on the road were a man with a bottle and a boy with a cane. 

She ducked behind her sheets and watched them over the top. Peeta looked wound up, Haymitch as placating as he's capable of being, being himself and being drunk. They weren't able to go along very quickly. So Peeta had a good long while to only pretend to be listening to whatever Haymitch was saying, as he scowled toward my house, which had no lights on yet. Haymitch was waiting for an answer when Peeta said, “That's the same cat?”

Leevy followed his gaze and saw the tomcat hunkered on my porch. Haymitch looked around and weaved a bit. It must not have occurred to him that nobody had seen Buttercup, everybody's favorite stuck-in-a-bunker entertainment, since months ago in District Thirteen. And Peeta was surely just asking a question, waiting for “real” or “not real” in response. For a moment, the only sound was some creaking and smashing from inside my house.

But Haymitch grunted, said, “Hold this,” and deftly swapped his bottle for Peeta's cane. Peeta stopped in his tracks and watched as Haymitch went up alongside my porch and reached with the cane to pull the screen door open just far enough for the cat to slip inside. 

Haymitch was shambling back in Peeta's general direction when a voice that sounded very little like mine bellowed, “Get out.”

A long pause, then another crash. “Get out. She isn't here. You wasted a trip.”

I remember throwing a piece of the chair at the door and Buttercup hissing at me. “She isn't here. She isn't ever coming back! Prim is not here!” Buttercup switched from a hiss to a kitten mew at the sound of her name and tried to come forward. I threw another chair leg at him. Outside, everyone flinched. “Prim is gone!” I am coming apart, I cannot take this into myself or carry it on my back or find my way through this or let go of any more than I've already lost. I can hardly see for the blinding pain of it. “Prim is dead! Prim is dead!”

Some kind of animal sound is coming out of me, a sob, a scream, so long and sustained it might be singing. Outside, Leevy tells me, Peeta just looks straight ahead for a long time. Then he bows his head and his shoulders begin to shake. 

Haymitch looks over his shoulder at my darkened door, then back at Peeta, weighing something in his mind. Who can survive, who can be helped. He comes forward and returns the cane and takes the bottle back. He takes a drink. Then he puts his arm around Peeta and walks him three doors away to Peeta's house. It's a struggle for them to get up the porch steps and my howls follow them the entire way.

That night, as usual, lights are on in eleven of the twelve houses of the Victor's Village, but the one in darkness is mine.

I wake up at the first hint of light in the sky, freezing cold on my kitchen floor. My head feels leaden and my face is sticky. A pair of eyes glints at me here at floor level. Buttercup. Survival does indeed require unthinkable acts. He has stayed beside me through the night.

I get to my feet with an awful lot of popping and creaking and aches all through my skin. When I go to shut the door against the pre-dawn cold, I see a new shadow on my porch, but this time it's inanimate. It's a covered pot of cooked grains, surely from Greasy Sae, and it's weighing down a piece of paper. I bring these indoors and turn on the light. The paper has a note in handwriting I don't recognize. “Katniss — we would like to get 10 of the ready-made houses. We'll send the order away with this train but payment can be later, probably next train I think. Take care of yourself.” I don't know whether to feel relieved or ashamed.

Buttercup is listing to the side and on closer examination I think he must not be doing very well. We eye each other from a distance as I stamp my feet and try to warm up my hands. Then I get a little bottle out of the back of a cabinet and put a tiny drop of its contents onto one of the squirrel livers still sitting in a bowl on my counter. I am pretty sure sleep syrup will work on a cat as long as I don't overdo it, it's just a question of whether I can trick him into eating any. 

He must remember that this is what we do — I give him guts and he steers clear of me in return — or else he must be painfully hungry, because he eats the liver after just a cursory sniff. I give him another, not a doctored one, and watch as he chews more and more slowly and then keels over entirely. 

I have put salve on the ear and several other scrapes and claw marks, gotten what seems like hundreds of burrs and ticks off from all over his bony limp body, and have just screwed up my courage to see what's going on with his hind paw when there's a footstep on my porch. It's got three impacts instead of two. My jaw clenches and I wait till the knock on the screen door before I look up. 

Peeta looks extra pale in the pre-dawn light. I don't say anything. He shifts some things around in his hands, the cane plus something else, and opens the screen door, but then just stands against the jamb without coming inside. He seems distracted by the sprawl of nasty orange fur in front of me. I suppose it looks weird, me sitting here amid the splintered pieces of the chair with the remnants of my mother's healing supplies spread out for the benefit of this undeserving creature. A moth comes in and heads for the ceiling light fixture. 

He finds his voice and says, “Is that cat alive?”

I try to bite my tongue but it's no good. “After all the work I'm putting in, he better be.” I find that my voice is hoarse from all the sobbing. To give myself something to do, I pull back Buttercup's eyelid and check the pupil. No worries. 

Peeta fidgets. “Look — I came to apologize for something I said earlier. I didn't try to call you to let you know I was coming here.” He pauses. That's what he's apologizing for? “I knew you weren't answering your phone, and Haymitch knew I was coming, but I didn't try to tell you myself and I shouldn't have suggested that I did.”

I sit back on my heels. I really can't find a response to this and his tone is not what I'd call conciliatory. “Okay.” 

“Right.” He lifts the other thing he's carrying and puts it on the countertop just inside the door. The napkin falls open around a loaf of bread. “That's all.” He turns and I hear his triple footsteps recede. 

I stare after him, then look up at the lost moth endlessly circling the light above me. Finally I stir and go back to work on Buttercup's paw. I better finish this before he wakes up.

He isn't likely to tolerate the bandage around his mangled cat toes for long, but this is about as good as I can do for him. I bundle him up in a blanket and put him in my lap. Not really my style, but it seems like the thing to do. I sit there for awhile, looking around at the half-wrecked kitchen, before I figure out that what I want is to have a mother that I can call. I scoop up the cat and carry him with me to the phone. 

I wake her up by calling, but she says she doesn't mind. I guess my voice must sound strange because she says, “Katniss, what's wrong?”

I find it hard to answer. “Well. Um. Yesterday …” I chicken out. “Yesterday Buttercup came back.” 

“Oh,” she says, softly.

“They must have turfed him out of Thirteen. I gave him some sleep syrup on a squirrel liver so that I could clean him up. Not as good as you or … not as good as you would have done, but I think he'll be okay. He hasn't woken up yet even though I didn't give him very much. Like half a drop.”

She thinks about it. “Just make sure he keeps breathing.” She doesn't say what I'm supposed to do if he stops. “It's good of you to look after him.”

“I don't know what else I'm supposed to do.”

“Katniss, he's a cat, there's only so much you can do.”

“No, I don't know what I'm supposed to do. Because —” My voice is starting to get a hitch in it. “Mama, because Peeta came back yesterday too.”

“Oh,” she says, even softer than before.

She waits for me, but I'm doing nothing except breathing unevenly into the phone. “How is he doing?”

I gulp and words spill out of me. “I don't know. We ran into each other by accident and were kind of mad at each other. Everyone was staring at us. Then this morning he brought me a loaf of bread but I think Haymitch might have got him to do that.”

“Oh I see.” 

No she doesn't. I sniff at the phone and try to get my breathing under control. “I think they all think we're still supposed to be in love. We sort of yelled at each other and a bunch of the women started crying.”

Aside from saying I was too young to have a boyfriend, but letting him spend time at our house in a friends-sort of way, I have no idea what she thinks about Peeta and me. I think she knew there wasn't much choice about it. She never asked me, after the Quarter Quell, about the things Peeta had said for the cameras — that we'd done the toasting, that I was pregnant — but maybe she knew they were totally made up. She could have asked when I started feeling something for him, but I don't even know if that question has an answer. She could see how things went for me in Thirteen, I guess. Assuming she could bear to look.

She sounds like she's choosing her words carefully when she says, “Were you glad to see him again?”

“Maybe for a second.”

“Why not after a second?”

“I don't think we like each other at all anymore.”

Another pause before selecting her words. “I don't know if you know that I spent some time with him in the Capitol. Helping treat him but also just talking, to see how he was doing.”

I have no idea how I would have known this. “Did it bother him to talk to you? Because of me?”

She sighs. “I couldn't tell. Katniss, if I were meeting him for the first time then, I would have described him as a person who never trusts anybody.”

“But that isn't Peeta. The old Peeta. You know what I mean. I thought things had gotten better, but now he came back here and really he's still gone.” There is a long enough pause that I start to realize how utterly transparent I'm being. 

My mother doesn't make me admit it, though. She also doesn't feed me the line that he might be the same somewhere underneath it all. She just says, eventually, “I don't think you trust people very easily either.” 

“So?” I'm so annoyed that I squeeze Buttercup too hard and he wakes up with a yowl. He's too weak to move so he just lies in my arms hissing at me. My mother says, “What's going on?” and I have to go put the cat down. “Sorry. He woke up.”

“Make sure he has water to drink.”

“Okay.”

“Katniss, honey, I don't know what to say about Peeta. But I need to get ready to go to work.” 

“Okay.” 

“Do you want me to call you later?”

I squirm. “Maybe. Look, I did what you suggested, about the money. I'm going to buy some little houses so people have more places to live here. I just wanted to tell you that. Because you helped.”

She actually sounds pleased with me. “That sounds really nice.”

We get off the phone and I go kick the kindling around the floor. Then I remember that I promised to give Buttercup water so I find his old dish and fill it for him. He laps up a bit so I guess I'm not screwing up every single thing. 

I don't know what she meant about trusting people. It's true, fine, but there's nothing I can do about it. Only time and acts of proof have ever given me a reason to trust people. I still don't really like anyone to touch me. I still expect people to demand something from me. And I never found it easy to be kind to Peeta the way he is now.

I did used to trust Peeta, from the first arena up till the moment his hands closed around my neck. And back before and during the Quarter Quell, he trusted me — to have his back, if not to love him the way he loved me. Then his brain was pretty much turned inside out during a couple of months in the Capitol prison. Plus another couple of months during which the folks in Thirteen talked him out of believing I was a mutt created to kill them all, and he got well enough to ice a cake, though not enough for anybody to let him do anything halfway normal. Then back to the Capitol for the disastrous mission, when he must have had no way of knowing moment to moment whether he'd be treated kindly or like a maniac, when he found enough clarity to understand that he was dangerous and to ask the rest of us to kill him. A line of thinking that only Gale could really follow. I shudder. Yes, the last time I was around Peeta, he couldn't trust anybody, not even himself. And I don't really have any idea what's happened to him in the meantime. Except what I think I've observed on his body, which is that he's lost his other leg and had his hands burned in what can only have been the fire from the bombs at the City Circle.

I work on imagining our positions reversed. But what is one distrustful person supposed to do with another one? Keep your hands where they can see them? Stay at a distance? Of course, it'll be easy to not seek him out, not when it's this hard to even exchange a civil word with him. I don't know if to let him go is the right thing to do. But if I were him, I'd want to be let alone. There's nobody making our lives be joined at the hip anymore. I think of him standing there in the ashes of the bakery and resolve to keep to my own affairs.

I have to get into the woods and spend a couple days singing to the mockingjays before I come to terms with continuing on. But then I bring back some decent game and have plenty more guts to feed to my convalescent cat. I get another brace of rabbits and make a couple people happy. I go find Thom and tell him I'm good for the payment for ten of the ready-made houses. 

The weather is now getting warm enough that people are throwing open the windows for a good part of the day and spending time outside in the evening beyond what's necessary for chores, and the demonstration of exactly how many people are crammed into the other nine houses makes me really glad that they made this request of me. I feel bad about living alone in my big house. But I can't bring myself to go into my mother's room, let alone Prim's. I don't think I could welcome anybody else in.

Maybe, though, if I just moved, it would be less of a problem. The little houses arrive two trains later, strapped onto several cars in neat rows like a traveling neighborhood. They come from District Seven, where they're built, with crews and machinery to help move them into place and get them hooked up to the water and electricity. People eagerly crowd inside the first couple to look around. A house that's clean of coal dust. A main room with little bedrooms above it, unlike the one-room house I grew up in. Hot water right out of the faucet. 

I like these houses and so I find Haymitch, figuring he'll tell me straight, and ask if it would be better if I took one of the little houses whenever we buy another round and then I could let a big family or a group of people have my house in the Victor's Village. He shakes his head at me and says, “Nobody'd take your house anyway.”

“Why not? They accept the money, why not my house?”

“Listen. If they want to follow through on the deal, go along with it. Survive the Games, take the house and the money, and make yourself useful.” He makes a bitter noise like a laugh. “There's only seven of us. Isn't a big national expense. We're the last of our kind. Takes the edge off, for them and us.”

He's obviously been taking off a lot of edges. I'm not entirely convinced, but I consider the fact that I wouldn't want to set any kind of precedent about this — because they did leave our houses vacant all that time in case we came back, and especially because cleaning Haymitch's house enough to make it fit for anyone else to live in is probably impossible — so I don't pursue the idea.

The houses are set up by nightfall. Greasy Sae has got a big pot of stew going and Chap gets out the last fiddle left in District Twelve and some people decide to dance there in the street, especially once Haymitch and some of the others pass around bottles. I avoid both the dancing and the bottles. In a lull, we all cheer for the crews from Seven. Then they decide to raise their glasses to me too and I struggle mightily not to be embarrassed but instead to put on a smile and say that I'm glad to help. I never got used to being in front of an audience without Peeta beside me, or at least without time to think about what he'd say. As if the thought conjured him up, my eyes land on him at the other side of the crowd. He just looks thoughtful at this distance. 

We develop a mutual strategy of nodding and saying hello or good morning or whatever's suitable if we pass each other in the road, but nothing else. The first weeks, after his return to Twelve and my howling fit in my house, are so awkward they're painful. People are always looking back and forth between us if we're anywhere in the same vicinity. I don't know what they're expecting to happen. Maybe they think I'll pull off my hunting jacket to reveal one of my pretty gowns and we'll declare that it has all been a misunderstanding, or they'll finally get to hear which part of it was an act. 

We sometimes pass on the walkway in the Victor's Village but mostly I just see Peeta combing through the wreckage of the bakery and then helping with the salvage work in the rest of what was the mercantile part of town. I get the impression that he spends a lot of time baking otherwise. I guess he's holding up okay — at least, I don't see him with his head in his hands in the rubble more often than anybody else is. People seem to be treating him decently, if cautiously. I don't really know what's common knowledge about what happened to him, but fortunately no one asks me questions so I'm not put in the position of deciding whether to tell anything about him behind his back.

I guess this means things are improving. Peeta is free and alive. My neighbors are fed and have somewhere to live and no one has to go down into the mines anymore. I talk on the phone to my mother and it isn't one hundred percent awkward. I even answer the phone when Dr. Aurelius calls and apparently this prevents the both of us from getting in a great deal of trouble. He gives me suggestions for the days when it doesn't seem possible to get out of bed, so I guess the conversations are not a waste of time. Haymitch and his stupid geese provide amusement for everybody. I still wake up in the night wailing, but I keep my windows closed so I won't bother anyone.

My eighteenth birthday goes by and my mother sends me a present of a new pocketknife. This is terrific not only because it's a good knife, but because it clearly means she has a job that pays for more than necessities. Nobody was ever much for birthdays in Twelve, growing up, at least among the kids in the Seam. If you were decently well off you might have a cake like the ones that Peeta's father usually put on display in the bakery window. If you weren't decently well off, you got nothing but a song at breakfast and, later, you went for your tesserae. I take the knife with its perfect new scissor blades out on the porch and untie my scraggly hair and cut it all back to an even length below my chin. The clippings blow into the yard and sparrows come by and collect them.


	4. Live with yourself

↔ Part Two: Together ↔   
↔ Live with yourself ↔ 

One evening in the first week of June I am heading out of the woods to the path along the side of the Meadow. The rows of narrow hillocks with their makeshift markers have been slowly covered with growth throughout the spring, including the dandelions that just finished tormenting me, but I realize now that a new plant has become dominant, with spires reaching skyward all over the place like extra grave markers. A few always used to grow here, but they prefer disturbed ground and all of the digging must have helped them spread. In the fading light, the blossoms are opening all around me. Primrose. The yellow flowers of evening primrose.

There wasn't enough left of my sister to lay to rest anywhere, let alone to identify and ship home, but here she is. In yet another field of yellow flowers. 

I try to make myself go along the path at a steady walk, but I start shaking and halfway across I have to stop and crash off into the brush to vomit. I crawl a few feet back and sit there for a long time, chewing some mint leaves. It's nearly full dark by the time I get back to my feet. At least this way I won't be able to see the flowers so well.

Primroses bloom all summer, though, and so my haunting is not going to come to a quick close. The demolition and reconstruction efforts have disturbed the soil all through town and so the blooms are everywhere. I start trying to avoid being out in the evening. 

What I cannot avoid is the fact that it'll soon be reaping day. As the height of summer approaches, it isn't a comfort that I'll finally no longer be required to stand in a rope pen that day. I still voted for another Hunger Games to take place. 

I've realized how naive it was to think that Coin kept the vote, the plan, to herself. I killed her before she could make the public announcement but she had plenty of time to tell some aide or official up in that balcony. Nobody here in District Twelve is talking about the upcoming games, but who wouldn't want to avoid the topic if it wasn't going to affect them this time? I never turn on my television because I don't want to see anything that could possibly be on there, so I'm not hearing about it that way. And I'm afraid to ask anyone, even Haymitch, who backed me up, when and how the Games are going to take place. As if they might not happen if I don't I bring them up. That's the truth, isn't it? They wouldn't happen unless I caused them? And then who's to say they'll stop at just one?

In the sticky dark heat, I'm slowly drowning in the sun-softened gold of the Cornucopia. Then I fall through, but Peeta stays above, bleeding out, and I can't reach him because I'm being slowly chewed up by the white-skinned mutts that reek of roses and death. They reek of primroses and death. They drag me to a rope pen and I hear Peeta's name called, and Rue, and Cinna, and Finnick, and even Cato, Thresh, Clove, Gloss, Marvel, Chaff … and more and more and more, and I cannot get up to volunteer for any of them because I have lost my arms and legs, I can't even cry out that I volunteer because I have lost my tongue. I think I will be expected to kill them. But one by one they are given to mutts. And I have no escape. If I try anything, if I try to die, it'll be brought down on the ones I love. I am suffocating in hot cinders as all the people I've been the death of come and push me down. Prim is there in a lemon-yellow coat and she puts her hands on my face and helps push me down into the burning darkness. Reaching for me over her frail shoulders are thousands of others I don't recognize. They're the ones whose deaths will soon be my laid to my account. Peeta puts his hands over Prim's and I find that all I can do is scream his name in panic. They've taken him away from himself and there is nothing left. He's right there in front of me, and I can do nothing except scream his name.

“Be quiet,” he says. “Katniss, stop it, be quiet.”

My voice is tearing and it sort of breaks and my throat spasms. He is standing a few steps from me. “Stop screaming,” he says. I think I taste blood. I try to turn to see where the dead are now and I fall out of my bed.

He comes forward and lifts me by the arms, enough to get me off the floor, but I'm shaking so hard I can't get my feet under me and his hands hurt my skin. I'm tangled in sheets and covered in sweat. He can't keep his balance this way and lets me go. I crane my head so I can see his face. He's got one hand braced against the dresser and he looks like he just woke up. 

Past my own broken breathing, I can hear nervous voices outside my house. The window is pitch black but I can't tell whether that's because it's the middle of the night or because a lamp is on in here. I'd only just decided to take the risk of leaving my windows open while I slept. I hear what sounds like a knock on the door downstairs. 

Peeta crosses to the window and calls, “Go home, okay?” and limps away without waiting for an answer. He doesn't have any shoes on and I watch the metal or plastic of his feet move against the floorboards. There's a raw mark on the back of his elbow that looks like the mesh of a window screen. 

I try to say, “Don't leave,” but all that comes out is a croak. He looks at me. He doesn't go out the door but he doesn't seem to have any intention to come to me, either. I try again and nothing happens. 

Peeta says, “You might have strained all your throat muscles. Screaming that much. They'll heal up if you let them rest.” I do not want to think about how he knows this. I turn my face away and feel my eyes stinging. Maybe it's just the sweat in them.

It takes way too much effort to drag my legs in under me and get up on my hands and knees. I pull myself back into bed without ever managing to get fully to my feet. My scarred skin is aching. I curl up and finally look back at Peeta, who's still just standing there. I don't care if he can't lift me, but this is really kind of rude. I wipe the sweat out of my eyes and try to get a better look at his expression. 

When I try to form words, I can barely even whisper. “What?” he says. I flop over in irritation. So much for trying to ask a question. He sighs and limps forward to stand next to the bed. He's staying out of arm's reach.

I lick my lips and try again. “Have I done something to offend you?”

He pulls back a bit and looks at me, surprised. But I know that I've seen him angry with me enough times before, honestly angry with me and not just made to hate me, to recognize some element of what's going on. “Yes,” he tells me.

I wait for him to elaborate. I'm shuddering with exhaustion and I have to close my eyes for a minute. When I do, I hear him move away from me. “Wait,” I try to say, but I only make a sound like a bird. His footsteps are still here, inside the room. I open my eyes to see him moving the straight-backed chair from beside the window close enough to be within range of my voice. He sits with his elbows propped on his knees, looking at his clasped hands, finding the words. 

“I don't understand,” he says eventually, “how you could have voted to hold another Hunger Games.”

I remember him at that grand table, so righteous, angry in a way that didn't even touch the rage I was feeling. I'm trying to figure out how to get that into any kind of answer when he adds, “I also don't know why you shot Coin instead of Snow. Though I don't know if I'd say that that offends me.” 

I look up at him. He's still studying his hands. “I'm also pissed off that Haymitch always chooses you. I realize I should be angry with him, not you, but I can't really help it. Also, you seem all happy and back to normal here, and that doesn't seem fair.” He pauses and thinks for awhile more. “That's it.” Then he finally looks at me. 

By now I'm just gaping at him. He frowns as if I've failed to hold up my end of some deal. So I try to collect my thoughts. But I'm stuck on the last thing. I whisper, “Do you still think I'm happy? Right now?”

“Well — no. But usually you seem fine.”

“I'm trying to get better,” I protest. He's the one who's acting more or less normal on a daily basis. I'm the one who had a meltdown over a house cat. 

He seems annoyed. “Right. Never mind.”

“There's primroses everywhere,” I say weakly, as if this will even make any sense to him. 

But it seems to register. He says, “Are those yellow flowers primroses?” 

I nod. My eyes are stinging again and I look away.

I can feel his eyes on me. “I see,” he says.

I doubt it. “Do you know how Prim died?”

Long pause. “In the bombing at the City Circle.” 

I make myself say it. “Do you know who killed her?”

He holds his breath for a moment. “I saw the hovercraft with the Seal of Panem on it … but there's also what Gale told me.” 

I hope it isn't obvious how startled I am to hear him mention Gale. Also it occurs to me now that Gale was not on the list of things he's angry with me about. 

“He told me that he believed that Thirteen bombed its own medics. There was something about Prim not being old enough to be there unless somebody specifically sent her. He said that the whole thing would've been a ruse, a way to make Thirteen look more heroic and sacrificing, to make sure the other districts let them take charge. ” 

“When did Gale tell you this?” I whisper.

“During your trial. I guess it was sometime in February.”

I'm trying to picture this conversation taking place. I must be wearing a strange expression because he says, as if this explains it, “He showed up and said he was heading off on that campaign to round up the holdout Peacekeepers, you know, and he thought before he left he better buy me a drink and tell me about something.” 

This does not explain anything at all, in fact, but Peeta just adds, “He said you already knew this. About Thirteen.”

“Parts of it. Not the … not the big picture. Just Prim. Except when I asked him about it, he said he wasn't sure.” 

Peeta shrugs. “Well. Either he didn't want to admit it to you or he found out some things after that.”

I drop my eyes and look away. “He as good as admitted it.” 

“Is that how you found out?”

I swallow hard. It makes bile rise in my throat just to think about it. “No. I found out from Snow. That morning.”

He's just watching me. “Is that why you shot Coin instead of him?”

I start to shiver again. I'm wearing a flimsy summer nightgown and after sweating and screaming so much my body has cooled too quickly. I feel awfully exposed and I pull the sheet over me. I can't look at him. “Nobody's ever asked me why.” 

He waits. He's still patient, I guess. 

I try to think back on those moments on the plaza enough to answer him, but not enough to fall back into nightmares. My voice seems to drip out of me weakly, along with tears. “Because of Prim. But also because of what they wanted me to do. Stand up in front of them and kill somebody so they all could watch. Snow was dying anyway and nothing was going to change. She was never going to let me be, either use me or get me out of the way, and she wanted an arena to run.” I start to sob. “I don't want there to be any more Games.” 

It seems like a long time before he says, stiffly, “Then why did you vote for them?”

I can scarcely get the words out and I can't make them make sense anyway. “Because of Prim. I had nothing left. I wanted to kill them all. Nothing was ever going to change.” I can't bear to tell him all of it — I'd rather tell half a lie than make him live with hearing that part of it was vengeance for what was done to him. It's still the truth that it was to make them all pay in blood for her. As if I didn't already know that doesn't get anyone anywhere but dead and ruined. I gasp through my tears, “I screwed up, I shouldn't have done it. But it's too late now. It's too late.”

“What do you mean?”

I can't answer. I wave toward the west, toward the Capitol. I have no idea if this communicates anything to him. After frowning at me for awhile, he says, “Katniss, they're not holding another Hunger Games.”

I must have heard him wrong. But he repeats the words after a moment. My breath sticks in my aching throat and I reach for him as if this is something I could verify by touch. 

“I mean, it's hard to believe you voted that way in the first place, but at least you undid it,” he says, as if he doesn't want to comfort me too much.

“I did?” I beg. He nods. 

I press my face into the sheets and just lie there and sob. He lets me hang onto his hand.

After a long time, I realize that the sky is getting lighter outside. I think I might have dozed off. Peeta is still beside me but his hands are folded over his stomach now. When I shift, so does he. He rubs his eyes and gets cautiously to his feet. “If you're sleeping, I'm going to go home.”

Before he can get too far away to hear me, I whisper, “Peeta? Thanks.” This doesn't begin to cover it but it's the best I can do. 

“You too,” he says quietly. 

I don't sleep for long, but I feel better when I get up. I shower off the sweat of my nightmares and go see what I have for breakfast. In the kitchen I discover that Peeta must have put his elbow through my screen door to get at the latch inside. I keep the door locked because if I don't Buttercup pushes it open and lets the bugs in instead of using his stupid cat flap. There are plenty of bugs in here now. I find some small nails and am poking at the detached edge when I look up and see Peeta approaching the porch. 

“You got there ahead of me,” he says, showing me the hammer he's holding in the hand without the cane.

I shrug and gesture to the cane. My voice is still papery but at least it doesn't hurt much. “Weren't you walking without that yesterday?”

He looks down. “I left it outside your room. I can do short distances without it. Didn't figure I should be waking you up with something like a weapon in my hand.”

I hadn't considered this. “Oh. Well. I'm glad you don't need it all the time.” 

This is incredibly pointless and I can't blame him for not replying. We just stand there for a minute. Mercifully nobody else is out and about nearby yet. Peeta looks like he's about to leave when I say, “I realized I sort of forgot to finish answering you.”

He turns back. “What about?”

“About Haymitch.” I turn a nail around and around in my fingers. I'm not going to tell him he's read the situation right, even though he might have, because I think Haymitch would atone if he could figure out how. For letting Peeta volunteer and then leaving him in the arena. I think, like me and the bread, it isn't even possible to pay what's owed. “Do you want me to say something to him?”

In the daylight he looks ashamed about it. “No. Never mind.”

I study him, then shrug again. “Okay.”

“Okay. See you around.”

As I tap in the nails, I decide that this is, as so many things are, awkward but not the end of the world. Maybe we can talk sometimes, and clear up some misunderstandings and not feel obligated to so thoroughly avoid each other.

I catch more far glances at us than usual in the next few days. I suppose there's not a person left in the district who doesn't know that he had to come wake me up, and all I can hope is that not quite so many people are aware that he spent most of the rest of the night in my bedroom. I try not to think about our time on the train together, when he used to stay with me after waking me out of my nightmares, and he could sleep too if he was next to me. That option is as dead as the people in my dreams. But the glances drop off, back down to the level that I've had to get used to. We don't really talk again. It's like before, just nods and greetings. At least it doesn't feel so strained. I guess this is why people aren't watching us with the same level of intensity — there's nothing to see. 

There are new faces to look at, anyway. Word has somehow gotten out that there's plenty of space for people to come back to District Twelve if they want to. This is clearly about as accurate as anything else from the rumor mill because all we did by getting more houses was make a tolerable amount of space for the people already here. But people seem to want to come home. Not all of them, of course, and you can't really blame anybody for wanting to leave Twelve and never come back. But people come back, in small groups on the trains, relatives or groups of friends or just people who ended up living near each other in District Thirteen. There aren't many families that made it intact out of the firebombing and the days in the forest. 

The new arrivals have to camp for a bit when they first get here, but it's summer so this is no hardship. We do have plenty of lumber shipments and so we occupy ourselves by building new houses along the emptied roads between the train station and the Victor's Village. They let me help now, for some reason. We use the ready-made ones as models.

The feel of Twelve changes — it used to be almost all adults, with less than a dozen kids, just Leevy's brood and Greasy Sae's granddaughter and a handful of others. The kids definitely skew young — Peeta and I are the oldest of them by three or four years. Or we're the youngest of the adults by a couple years, whichever. It seems strange that there's no one our age, but I guess funny gaps appear when ninety percent of your population dies and half the rest won't come home. Most of the kids are barely old enough for lessons, but now at the village meetings there's talk about setting up a school, maybe hiring a teacher from one of the other districts since none of our own survived.

In the general milling around after that meeting, I cross paths with Peeta, who says with no preamble, “Does it ever seem weird to you that we never finished school?” 

I blink at him for a second, then say, “Were you learning anything except how to mine coal?”

He tilts his head. “Not so much.” 

At the next meeting he offers to cover the wages for a teacher. Or more than one, if that would be better. Maybe he and Haymitch have been talking. 

Even though everyone has things to do all day, it's obvious even to someone who pays the amount of attention that I do that no one has paying jobs. I'm not sure where people get the coins that they use to pay me for game. Maybe they were salvaged from the burned buildings, which I could hardly blame anybody for, or maybe they're coming somehow from this money from the Capitol. But no one has rebuilt any shops and there's nothing to produce in District Twelve. People start to talk under their breath about whether it would be better to reopen the mines, at least just to check whether the coal deposits might ever stop burning. 

A bunch of what are called consultants arrive on the next train. I avoid them, just in case there are cameras. Supposedly, through the sheer power of their brains they will come up with an industry for us. I figure they must be from District Three to have minds that good. I hope we don't have to make electronics, though, because I didn't much like the look of the factories there. Maybe District Twelve is the only one with nothing left to produce. It's not like the others stopped having fish or pastures or what have you. Well, maybe some of the factory districts are in rubble like us. I briefly consider turning on my television to find out, but I don't want anything else to keep me up at night.

The consultants depart in a hovercraft after just a few days, which doesn't seem to bode well. They say they'll get back to us as soon as they can. So in the meantime, people go back to turning the hope in their eyes on me and Peeta. The star-crossed lovers can't possibly make any better a distraction now than they did a year and a half ago. I wonder if someday they'll notice I'm trying to leave him be.

Sleep is not really my thing anymore. It's way too hot at night to keep the windows closed and so I had been trying to keep Buttercup in the house at night, because he'll sometimes sleep on my bed, though not curled up against me like he used to do with Prim, and if I yell or thrash he'll reach out and sink his claws into me. I was starting to think he had redeeming value. But one day I found the door to Prim's bedroom open, Buttercup in there scratching all across that bed that was far too big for her as if at last he would unearth clues to her disappearance. I bellowed him out of the room and smoothed Prim's coverlet with shaking hands and closed the door as gently as I could behind me. Nobody gets to go in there, nobody at all. 

Now I spend most nights sitting in my straight-backed chair by the window, waiting for dawn. The sight of people sleeping on their porches and taking midnight strolls to escape the heat indoors provides a reminder to try to keep myself out of nightmares. As you might expect, though, I find myself dozing off during the heat of the day. I put up a hammock on my porch like a lot of other folks have done. I'm having a nap out there one afternoon when all of a sudden I find myself back in District Thirteen, wracked with anxiety, blood across the tiles. Then I find myself netted up and screaming, with a whole bunch of people around me trying to untangle me. I switch right from screaming to hollering, “Sorry,” which turns out to be kind of funny, or maybe it's that I have limbs sticking out in inexplicable directions. Peeta's among my untanglers, flour up to his elbows. I'm half-laughing with the others and helplessly watching him use a paring knife to slice apart one of the ropes holding up my hammock. There are apple peelings around the base of the blade. He says, as if it's normal for us to have a conversation, “So, I was under the impression that you dream about people who have died, but why do you keep shouting for me?”

“Is that what I was saying?”

“Yes. Plenty of witnesses.” He puts the knife aside.

I don't really think about how my answer's going to sound, possibly because I'm distracted by getting (gently) thumped to the floor, possibly because I'm too exhausted to care. “I guess because you're my fault too, same as they are.”

A couple pairs of eyes come up to look at us. He's messing with a knot at my feet. “How so?”

“Cause it got taken out on you. Me being the Mockingjay.” When will I learn to shut up? 

He doesn't lift his face. But he says, “You didn't know at the time.”

“Yes I did.”

His hands go still on the ropes. I suddenly see him among the rebel soldiers in the Capitol, tying knots through the night as we all kept guard on him, treating him like an enemy. “You knew?”

“Well, not right away, but —” I feel compelled to answer him. People are pulling the hammock off me but they're doing a rush job of it and I'm getting jostled around. “At first I thought they'd kill you. And when they put you on TV I thought they'd just make you speak against whatever I did, but then I could see … I could see they were doing worse …”

Peeta plows right through the others and grabs me by the shirt and pins me against the porch railing. “ _You knew?_ ” The men are shouting and pulling on his arms and I realize I've got my hands straining against him too and his face is three inches from mine and terrifying me. “ _You let them do that to me?_ ” 

I lift my hands away from his shoulders and hold them next to my head where he can see them. I'm hoping he's forgotten there's a knife at hand and I'm trying not to shriek but it comes out that way anyway. “I had to! I had to! You think we could give up then?” He's still shouting “ _You knew?_ ” over top of me, not listening at all. “So I chose the war over you! So that's what I chose!”

He shoves me into the railing and stands up. I can feel flour sticking to my hands and I'm gasping. Nobody's touching either of us now. He just stares at me like he did when he thought I might be a mutt. Then he backs away and heads down the steps, fast, limping badly. 

Everybody's left on my porch, staring at me. I don't even wait to get free of the hammock, I just scramble inside and shut the door as fast as I can. 

Somebody must have gone to get Haymitch, or sober him up more likely. He pounds on my door about an hour later and comes in without waiting for an answer. I'm crouched in front of my fireplace, breaking twigs into ever-smaller kindling, like I need kindling in this weather. The bits go everywhere as Haymitch hauls me to my feet. 

I am about done being bodily thrown around. I try to push him away but he's already got me halfway out the door. “Where are you taking me?” I demand.

“You are going to see that boy and put things right,” he snaps. 

“I can't put him right, he's crazy,” I argue, but the words are barely out of my mouth before he lets me go with a little shove for good measure and aims a finger at me. Oh, no, there are still people out here.

“You listen. We had a deal.”

“What deal? The one where you lied to me?”

“ _We had a deal_ , sweetheart, we were gonna keep him alive —” 

“You made the same deal with him! It doesn't count! I've done everything you want me to! I did the best I could! I should've made you all save him first!”

“You agreed to help get him out of there.”

“He is out!”

“Yeah, you think that? Well you've still got work to do —” 

“You do it! I can't!”

“ _Do you think I would be out here talking to you if I could?_ ”

I just glare daggers at him. I'm not going to say yes, but my answer's yes.

He holds my gaze for a long time. Then he backs away. “Fine. You're the only one that has to live with yourself.”

I go back to my kindling. Greasy Sae doesn't come every day anymore and I wouldn't let her in if she did. 

Nobody sees Peeta at all for three days. Or maybe Haymitch does, but I'm not talking to him. There is a general mutter around me when I go out of my house and through town. I overhear enough to realize that by now — even if you leave out whatever they thought about us in the past — from what they've seen and heard, people are taking sides, Peeta versus me. 

The fourth day is train day and I realize that he might come out of his house for that, so I go out to the woods before dawn and don't come back until I can time it to walk straight to the meeting room. The sun is barely lowering at this hour, these days, and it's coming in the windows at a really bad angle and making people kind of annoyed as the meeting starts. I haven't spotted Peeta and that's fine with me. I take a chair in my usual general area, which is not near where he usually sits. 

Thom squints around after calling things to order and says, “Oh, Katniss, there you are.”

“Hi,” I say. 

“Look. First order of business.” I didn't know I had anything to do with first order of business today. He clears his throat. “I'm sorry to put you on the spot like this but nobody could find you earlier, so sorry about this, but we have to address a problem.” 

There is a lot of extra shifting around all of a sudden. Maybe the sun isn't the only problem.

Thom clears his throat again. He looks like he wishes somebody else would say this for him. “Katniss and Peeta. We love you guys, we'd do anything for you guys, and everybody here knows that we don't have the faintest idea of what you've been through. But you have got to stop fighting. Okay? There aren't enough of us that we can ignore it. And this is not good for anybody. If you think that there's something the community can do to help, then tell us and we'll do it. But you need to stop fighting. At least in public.”

He stops and sits down. 

I now just barely see Peeta out of the corner of my eye, partway around the circle. He's got his arms folded and hasn't moved a muscle. I can't see his expression but it sounds like he must have gotten some kind of talking-to beforehand. I can feel my eyebrows ascending my forehead. 

Haymitch drawls, “I take it you have something to say, Katniss?” 

I stare at him. He is seriously drunk, worse than I've seen for quite some time. Reaping day drunk. “Yeah. Do you get a free pass because you're sloshed or because everyone's given up on you?” 

Nobody makes a sound. Haymitch looks ready to hit me. I ignore him — what's boiling up in me isn't for him. “Peeta and I,” I start, and then pause to find the words, and you could probably hear a pin drop in there, I don't think anyone's breathing. 

“Peeta and I are your tributes. Your tributes that had to go back. That got put in the war. So you've seen plenty of what we've been through. You know we should be dead. You've seen every time we got … set up against each other. But I'll tell you — I'll tell you what we're not. We're not living through that anymore. You can't vote on what we do. I will buy you anything I can, I will buy it with my life if I have to, but what actually needs to happen is you need to stop watching us.”

I stop to try to think again, but I've used up anything I could express. The air in the room is too thick to breathe. I pick up my bow and quiver and walk out. I look at no one. 

I'm well out in the road when I hear a triple footstep on the wooden stairs down from the train station. I hesitate and struggle with myself and then turn and wait. 

“You don't have to wait for me,” he says as he comes close enough not to have to raise his voice. 

“I should have stayed for whatever you wanted to say,” I explain, feeling awkward.

“Oh, there was nothing else to say.”

The sun is in my eyes as I try to read his expression. I don't know what I've done to make him scrutinize me like this. “I guess that's a compliment, coming from you.”

“I never thought of just walking out, till you did.”

I can't think of a response to this. Following my example doesn't get him anywhere good.

“Were you going home?”

“I guess.”

He gestures down the road. We set off, a few feet from each other. He looks shakier than he did the last time I saw him. It's a longish walk so I match my pace to his. I'm trying to figure out if we're on the same side now, at least temporarily. Maybe there aren't sides, but I can't be sure.

As we head up the hill, he says, “I'm sorry about the other day, on your porch. I shouldn't have snapped like that.”

My gut twists. I keep my eyes on the trees. “I don't mind that you were angry, you know. Fair enough. But you can't grab me like that.”

“I know.” 

“I'm not just talking about not being rude. You attacked me. Twice. I know it wasn't … really you … but I don't want to think that might happen again.” I have to say this to him. I have to. Even though I realized, afterwards, that what happened on my porch looked a lot less like tracker jacker fury than like the time I saw him tear up a room out of anger at being kept ignorant.

“That's what I mean. I don't think it will.”

“But how do I know that?”

He shrugs. “I guess you don't. But I think I understand, now, what you were saying. Haymitch talked to me for a long time about that. Drank his way through it. About how the choices were made in Thirteen, about what they were trying to do and what they got you to do and what you all knew when.”

So that's what's been going on all this time. I feel sort of annoyed that I wasn't in on this illuminating conversation, though come to think of it I guess I refused to join in. “I don't see how you knowing that stuff will mean that I can trust you.”

I can feel him looking at me. I didn't mean to say that so baldly and I can't bring myself to meet his eyes. 

He says, “It means I can trust you. That makes a difference.”

My heart is lurching. It takes me a long time to say, “I want to help you. I really do. I just don't think I'm very good at it.”

We walk in silence for awhile. “You might want to know,” he says, “that when they cornered Haymitch and me this afternoon, about not fighting, Haymitch told them they weren't going to get anywhere by springing it on you.”

I snort. “That's funny, I feel like we got somewhere.”

He looks sideways at me. “Very true.”

I close my eyes so I can pretend I'm just thinking this inside my head. “Peeta, I really, really miss talking with you.”

I hear him say quietly, “I miss that too.”

But then I have to open my eyes to see where I'm putting my feet. 

We slow down at my house. I say, with no idea how to do this, “Do you want to come in?”

He looks at me, then down the row of houses. “I'm … actually really tired. I could sleep.”

“Oh, okay,” I say, half relieved. 

“Katniss? Thanks. For what you said.”

“Okay. See you.”


	5. Arm's reach

↔ Arm's reach ↔ 

Reaping day passes almost without incident. Almost. I can't focus enough to hunt and so I find myself spending the entire day deep in the woods, picking blackberries and singing drinking songs of the sort that miners would sing at each other's wakes, which my father probably never realized I learned this well. When the mockingjays pick them up there's an endless boisterous defiant noise around me and I don't have to think about anything. My singing voice has warmed up well over the past months, though it's lower and less clear than I remember, maybe from the fire that got into my lungs, maybe from the fact that I somehow seem to have lived to adulthood. 

I come back at sundown and am skirting the Meadow when I see movement out of the corner of my eye. Not a plant in the wind, not an animal. I look through the waving spires of primrose and see a hunched figure on the ground. Peeta. Alone here among the graves.

I dither for a minute and then make my way toward him, picking around the grave markers but deliberately finding a few twigs to step on so he'll hear me coming. He doesn't look up, though, and when I'm in the same row with him I just stand there for awhile because I don't know what's going on. Or rather, I'm worried that I do know what's going on, but I feel kind of surprised about it. He looks like Annie did in Thirteen, folded over with his hands pressed over his ears, locked inside his own head. Where something bad is clearly underway. He did something similar a few times while we infiltrated the Capitol, struggling to keep the right hold on reality. I just sort of thought he must be over this, because I hadn't noticed it back here in Twelve, and why would they have let him go from the hospital if this is still happening?

Just in case he doesn't recognize me as human whenever he finally looks up, I sit down a good three yards from him and keep my bow at my side. The primroses open around us and I have to try not to lose my grip myself. I take the lid off my bucket of blackberries and eat a few, letting the tart taste hold my attention. 

Gradually, Peeta's shoulders relax and his breathing gets calmer. He was on his knees to begin with and now he folds the rest of the way over and lets his hands fall against the earth. I can see that his eyes are open. I wait for what seems like a plenty long time and then say, “I just want to see if you know that I'm sitting here.”

He doesn't move at all. “Yeah. Sorry.”

“Why are you sorry?”

He sounds exhausted. “I knew you were there, I just couldn't ….”

I don't know what he might mean. I cast around. “Do you want some blackberries?”

He laughs. I haven't even seen him smile since the Quarter Quell and then he laughs at blackberries. “Maybe in a minute.” 

Well, fine, I won't eat them all. I sit there and breathe in the smell of primroses. They're useful plants. I think my father wanted to name us after useful plants but Prim got one that was pretty too. Peeta eventually turns onto his back and lies there, staring up at the orange sunset sky. 

“Does this happen to you a lot?” I hear myself ask.

“I guess. In some form or another. Doesn't usually take so long.”

I'm trying to figure out whether I can ask this politely when he looks at me and says, “In case you're wondering, it's almost always real stuff. Not … not-real stuff.”

“Flashbacks,” I say, finally coming up with the word.

“Right. Not the hijacking. I mean … I remember it, I'm just not thinking it. If that makes sense.”

That makes me feel a lot better, actually. I spot a mullein within arm's reach and pull off one of the big leaves at the bottom. I put a handful of blackberries on there and scoot forward to put them where he can reach them. 

Halfway through the handful, he says, “You don't have enough for a pie, do you?”

I look in the bucket. “I might.” 

“That would be good.”

“Are you baking a lot?”

“Some. I need to get an oven.”

“What's wrong with your oven?”

“The one in my house is fine, I mean a big one. So I can open the bakery.”

I didn't expect that. “Really?”

He peers over at me. “What the hell else am I going to do?”

“I don't know.”

“Exactly.”

“You could paint.” He has genuine artistic talent.

He makes a face. I drop the subject.

When he's done with the blackberries, he sits up and looks around. The light is dim now, but the primroses are glowing amid the black shards of grave markers. There's nothing else to see until the tree line and, far in the distance, a row of new houses with lights on. 

“How many people are buried here?” he asks me. 

I hope I remember the number correctly. “I was told it's seven thousand, eight hundred and eighty-five.” He's still just looking around. “That's the number of graves. I guess that there are some with two people. Like if someone was holding a baby, they buried them together.”

He makes some kind of sound and rubs his hands over his face.

“Have you been out here before?”

He shakes his head. “It was done before I got here. But it occurred to me that today a year ago was the last time I saw my family and I thought … maybe it was the right thing to do to come find where they were buried. I didn't know the graves weren't marked.”

I point at the ones beside me. “They're marked with where people were found.”

He looks away. “I see that.” 

“It was the best they could do. I guess they didn't find anyone in the bakery then?”

“No, they did. Three people. They're over that way.” He gestures behind us. “I just … wanted to know who was where.”

I don't see how there could be any respects to pay at the grave of anyone who treats you like his mother treated him. I guess that's what he means. 

“I figure Lee was at home and Mica was away,” he says eventually, so quietly I can hardly hear him. “Mica would've probably gone to watch the Games with friends.”

Why anybody would have rather watched his little brother struggle for his life in the company of friends instead of family? I feel like I have to say something. “I thought you got along with Mica. You were in wrestling together.”

“Exactly,” he says again. He lies back down and looks at the first few stars.

Maybe I have even less of an understanding than I thought I did of the family he's lost. But he's not so hard to talk to. I want to talk to him. “I do dream about the dead,” I say, confirming what he already knows. “It's worst when they all show up at once. Everyone that's here. Everyone else besides.” I swallow and admit, “They're my fault.”

I think he looks over at me, but under this guilt I can't look at him. “They're my fault too, Katniss,” he says. 

I'm upset and my voice is louder than I mean it to be. “No. I mean, they're not either of our fault. It's just that I was the trigger.”

He really, really wants to argue with me, I can tell. After awhile, he says, “I'm pretty sure I was right there with you.”

We stare at each other for a minute, then I look away across the Meadow, frustrated. He sits back up and pats around for his cane. “Look. I'm going home. If you have enough berries for a pie, I'll buy them from you.”

“You don't have to buy them.”

“Whatever, then I'll pay you in pie. Are you coming?”

I know that people see us as we come back from the Meadow at nightfall. Peeta doesn't seem to have the slightest care about that so I try to match his demeanor. I guess they can think what they want to think. Especially because of what I said at the meeting. Especially if they remember that this day used to be reaping day.

Greasy Sae is in my kitchen when we come up to my house. She has a stew going and it's as hot as midday in there. I make Peeta come to the door and wait while I find a bowl to put the blackberries in. 

“Can't I just take the bucket?”

“No, I need it to take back out tomorrow.”

“Well come get it tomorrow, but I don't want to spill these on my way home.”

“You live three houses away.”

“And wouldn't it be sad if I spilled all these in such a short distance.”

Greasy Sae is looking back and forth between us. “Young man, what do you need a whole bucket of blackberries for?”

“Pie,” he answers. 

There's no need to say more. Her face crinkles into a smile. “You better keep that hushed up or people'll be knocking down your door.” She turns to me — I'm letting her granddaughter sneak berries from the bucket — and says, “Girlie, you walk that bucket over to his place, that's worth it.”

I roll my eyes. Peeta bows me out the door ahead of him like we're fancy people. 

The best part is that Greasy Sae, for all I can tell, never breathes a word of this to anyone.

As the days get shorter, I bring him as many blackberries as I can find, wineberries, a couple days of pawpaws, and walnuts. He is equally interested in everything, including the pawpaws, which he isn't sure how to bake anything with. 

I sit in his kitchen and shell walnuts for him so only one of us has to get covered in black stuff. This is how I come to realize that he has flashbacks every day. He loses where he is, he just stops what he's saying or doing and huddles white-knuckled over the back of a chair or the kitchen counter until they're done, sometimes so quickly I hardly notice them before they're over, sometimes for long enough that I start to wonder if I should do something to help. When I work up the nerve to ask what I should do, he says there's nothing to do. “If you don't want to be here, that's okay. Maybe if something's in the oven and almost done, you could take it out before you go.”

I frown at him, at his face turned a little away from me. “I'm not taking off, I just want to know if I should do anything.”

But he says he's already doing everything there is to do. I don't ask further. I don't leave, I don't approach him, I'm just still there when he comes back.

We also sit on my porch sometimes. This started when he brought me the blackberry pie, most of which we ate in one sitting. It's kind of nice to be out there in the evenings. And I do seem to have bought us some breathing room. People walk by on their way into or out of town and usually wave and then determinedly avert their eyes from us, as if we're doing something embarrassing or they would like to pretend we're invisible. I think Peeta finds this funny, as I do, but we're not at a point where we can laugh together. I'm a little surprised by how much it seems to matter to him, because I never thought he minded people looking at him anywhere near as much as it bothered me. 

After maybe two weeks of this kind of thing, Haymitch strolls into Peeta's kitchen one day when we're both in there. “I think I better talk to you,” he says.

“Okay,” Peeta says. I go on cracking walnuts.

“You are aware you don't have to go to the other extreme, aren't you? What are you trying to prove with this?”

“This, what?” I say.

Haymitch doesn't dignify that with an answer. He looks at Peeta instead. 

Peeta is very carefully leveling off a cup of flour. He sets it down and looks at it for a long time before answering. “Haymitch, I think what Katniss said goes for you too, in a way. You don't have to make sure we're telling any kind of story anymore.”

Haymitch draws back and studies Peeta very intently. 

Peeta finally looks up at him. “I would think that would be a relief. If I were in your shoes.”

Haymitch just continues staring him down for some time, then tries to catch my eye, but I'm not having any of that. He startles me when he chuckles. “Okay. I'm going back to my geese. Just remember they don't require all my attention.”

Then he's swinging back out the screen door. 

Peeta looks at me, then cranes to see out the window that Haymitch really is gone. Under his breath, he says, “Lucky for them.”

It's often hard to find things to talk about. In a way, we're starting all over, yet again, in the bizarre backwards way that we know each other. We try reminiscing about childhood, but the fact that we went to school together can't smooth over the ugly differences in how we were provided for and what our families were like. Talking about people we knew is no good because most of them are dead. Out of his massive group of school friends, only Delly Cartwright is still alive. It's gotten harder to tell whether he has a decent handle on his own past, because all the landmarks are disappearing: the buildings, the people, everybody else's memories, the rubble with its clues. We can ask each other about our interests — baking, hunting — but you can't talk about these things all day. I like to eat but I'm not obsessed with different kinds of flour, and he likes to hear me describe plants and animals but he will probably never be comfortable in the woods. Seeing as the first time he spent any amount of time in a forest, it was during our first Games.

So, in what is maybe not a surprise, we end up talking mostly about the Games and the war. Rehashing old questions, filling things in, working slowly toward things that were too painful or too recent to even try to talk about in front of the rest of our squad in the Capitol, and things that happened after they all died. Despite the fact that the things we'd rather talk about are the people around us right now — the alive people — or even the money that some days feels like our main connection to them.

He asks me a lot of questions, like he's been saving them up. Some of them have anger underneath them. Some of them are of the “Real or not real?” format, but I think this has just turned into a bit of a habit. I try to be as matter-of-fact as I can, because it's obvious that he still needs the truth. But at some point I realize that he is watching me so closely because he's trying to figure out not only the facts but how I felt. How I feel. Fighting myself on that works some of the time. 

“You whispered with Rue. About the tracker jackers?”

“No … I think it was if she knew what you'd been doing. What she said helped me find you.”

“Could you have been happy in Thirteen?”

“Not on my own. But they said Prim could train to be a doctor.”

“What did you end up telling people? When it obviously wasn't true?”

“That I miscarried. It made some of them cry and I wished I could tell them it was a lie. You know, it worked out okay but … that's the only time you deliberately backed me into a corner.”

“I know. I remember, sort of. I was desperate.”

“Well. It got the right reaction.”

These exchanges aren't all in the same conversation, but they add up.

He asks me about five times to explain the berries I force-fed him, the ones I mixed with sleep syrup. I guess they made a lot of use of that footage. Yet he eats what I bring him now.

It's in one of his genuine “Real or not real?” moments that Peeta lists almost a dozen people around town, some of whom he knows only by description, and says, “They're not from District Twelve.” 

“They're not?” I say, confused, because I know that I've seen them before. And who in their right mind would move from one of the other districts to the infamously poor and backwards Twelve?

Then I realize. “Oh. Real. They're from District Thirteen.” I guess some of the refugees must have somehow made a pretty good pitch. It must have been a tough sell, seeing as everything here had to be built from the ground up and we have no work. Or — “Maybe all they needed to know was that you don't have to get your schedule tattooed on your arm every day here.” 

“Tattooed?” 

“Oh, right, you probably never had to do this.” I try to explain about sticking your arm in the wall and getting your day planned for you in purple ink. Either I don't do a very good job of it or he thinks it's extra crazy, because his expression is something. When I finish, he just sits there for awhile, then says, “How'd that work out for you?”

I snort. “By comparison, Haymitch should be honored by how well I follow his instructions.”

“I bet.”

“Nobody went hungry there, I guess that was the upside.”

“Still, though.” He ponders it. “I can see why some of them might have wanted to come here, just to see what it's like.”

“Did a lot of them go to the Capitol? You said they wanted to take it over.”

“Probably, there were people from all over. It's weird — you can just walk around the Capitol now. I didn't really mind being there, once I could do that.”

“Seriously? You liked it there?”

He looks at me for a minute as though trying to decide something. “I liked … being able to do what I wanted. Go around on my own. You realize being in Thirteen wasn't that different from being in the prison, for me, right? In some ways?”

This is a new topic. I look at him, nervous, but I think he's waiting on me. “I guess … being locked up and drugged and told you've got everything backwards … I guess I see that.”

He nods, still tense. “It was better in the Capitol. Even early on, with the soldiers, when I shouldn't have been sent there in the first place.”

But I can agree with this. “I was so glad not to be underground anymore. Just for those couple of weeks doing pointless stuff with our squad. My squad. Well.” I catch myself too late. I don't mean to call it our side as if he was fighting for the rebels. He sort of did at the end, but I don't know what he was really fighting for, if anything. His sanity. Wouldn't that be enough?

I've been thinking on and off for a long time that I'd like to know how it went for him after the Capitol fell, and what he was doing till he came here, but I still feel like we're both better off if I put some thought into how I ask him things. I don't want to start taking conversations with him for granted. I better just ask, though, and I may as well start at the beginning. “Peeta, I don't know if you want to tell me about this, but what happened to you, after we left the fur shop?”

I don't think he was anticipating that I'd ask this, but I hold my tongue. He can just not answer if he doesn't want to answer. He looks out over the green in the center of the Victor's Village. The days are shorter and since the light is already lowering, people seem to have settled in at home for the day. Our neighbors are faintly audible as they cook and chatter over supper. A few kids are running around at the far side of the square. Now that I'm put in mind of it, I think two or three of them belong to a family from Thirteen. 

We are sitting at opposite ends of my porch swing and we creak back and forth a little bit. He's looking down at his feet. “I followed you and Gale, like we planned,” he says. For awhile I think that's all he's going to say. “There was some man up ahead of me who got blown up and he had a knife that went flying, a good knife, and I picked that up.”

The thing that can be so hard to remember about Peeta, as he sits here on my porch with flour in his hair, is that he was a tribute who made a decent showing for himself. Deception and a knife.

“With all those pods going off, I went into a side street and I got on what turned out to be another route into the City Circle. It put me inside the line of Peacekeepers and that seemed like a useful place to be. They were posted at the intersections and they were all facing the City Circle, which seemed funny to me because I thought you all, rebels I mean, were coming from the other direction. But we were in that Capitol getup and it was awfully easy to just blend into the crowd and get in behind each of them with the knife. I was right up near the City Circle when the first bombs went off. Startled me and I was just a little too slow going for the last Peacekeeper — he was startled too and looked around and saw me. That's when I got shot. So that's how that happened. And then there were the second bombs, and people came pouring down the street in a stampede and some of them had been hit and one fell on me.” He looks at his hands briefly. “I couldn't get out of the street so that's where they found me. I was in the same hospital with you after that — I don't know if you know that.” 

“I remember seeing you there.” 

“They couldn't decide whether to put me in the burn ward or the amputee ward.”

He says this like it's mildly amusing. I don't mean to sound upset when I say, “That's how you lost your other leg?”

He gives me a look I can't read. “I got shot. Through the knees. I had to put a tourniquet on the one because there was no one to help. At least I remembered watching you do it.” 

Vividly, I can see him there, with burning hands, tying off his remaining leg and knowing what the consequences could be. 

Then I remember that he had a nightlock pill. And that he chose the tourniquet instead. And this is the first proof I've had that he might think I didn't do wrongly when I refused to leave him behind.

I look up to find him watching me closely. After a minute, feeling that I should do something, I reach over and touch his arm for a moment. Just a moment, to try to let him know I'm okay with hearing this, and then I take my hand back.

I'm still trying to absorb everything he's said, though, and I say, “Can I ask why? You didn't have to do all that. You could have waited it out.”

Peeta's eyes slide away from me. “I sort of knew that but I sort of … I was having trouble keeping track of things. The idea was for me to attack them from within if things got bad. Wasn't it? So I did.” He stops and looks kind of sick. 

I have seen Peeta kill people before, in the filmed recap of our first Hunger Games, and I know there was one in the second arena, though I never saw it. There was Mitchell. But this must have been quite a few. I wonder how much of a grip on his true self he had as he did it.

“I thought if they put a killer inside me that I may as well use it on them,” he says, as if he can read my thoughts. It's a valiant effort to keep talking, but then he folds over with his face in his hands. 

I wait it out with him. It takes a long time, and I find that “The Hanging Tree” is playing over and over in my mind, the way it did that day.

It's full dark when he sits up. I startle and realize I've been staring vacantly into space. Sometimes it is such a relief to be thinking of nothing at all.

He says, “Do you know that you're humming a bit?”

I clear my throat. “No. Sorry. I wasn't really thinking, I was just …” Doing absolutely nothing.

“No, it was nice. Do you sing now?”

I hesitate. 

“They showed me a clip of you singing. It was that song.”

“That was kind of a fluke. Pollux asked me to sing. I wasn't going to tell him no.” He must understand that they used that clip to try to hijack him back to himself. I deeply do not want to talk about that. I feel like I'm giving something away by admitting this, but I want to redirect him, so I say, “Sometimes I go in the woods and sing with the mockingjays.” 

“You do?” There isn't a lot of light, just from other houses' windows, but I think he looks pleased.

“It helps, a bit, when I'm having a rough day.”

“That's good. I'm glad you have that.” He doesn't say anything else and I gradually relax out of worrying that he's about to ask me to sing. 

Apparently I relax too much, because I'm startled awake by the movement of the porch swing as he gets to his feet. 

“I'm going to let you get to bed.”

“Sorry.”

“No problem.”

“Thanks for talking to me.” One or the other of us always says this, always. It seems essential.

“You too. Goodnight.”

He often stays on my porch with me until I'm ready to go to sleep. But I get the impression that he's not going to come in and wake me up again, even though anyone up at night in the Village can surely hear me, and I know he still doesn't sleep much. I can't imagine a way to ask him to wake me up that doesn't sound like I'm asking him to stay the night with me, anyway. I can tell from nods and nudges I see that some people think we should jump into bed together. It's not like I don't remember how his arms used to be my refuge. But I don't know why they don't get that we're probably only managing to carry on a conversation by staying well out of arm's reach.

I don't know what to call this thing that we're doing, or attempting. We're sharing food, mostly. You'd expect that of allies but we aren't splitting portions with the pathological precision we did in the arena. Food is also a good way to lure an animal. But I don't feel at risk of any kind of blow. It feels like the information we're sharing might counterweight what we've done to each other.

It works better here than it did among the soldiers of Thirteen, even though I credit them for being the ones to figure out how to hold a conversation with him in the first place, because I don't have to calculate whether my answers (or his questions) will go against our public story. But we made progress even under those circumstances — scary, fast, uneven progress — and it happens again here. It makes me uneasy sometimes. Not all wounds should be stitched up, forced to close.

The consultants come back to tell us their recommendation, which is that we should set up a factory for making medicines. They take the time to explain where this notion comes from — that District Twelve has mineral deposits and suitable soils for growing a lot of plants from which extracts and compounds and the like can be made — and all I can think is that they should have just checked with my mother, it didn't need to take weeks and weeks.

People are so excited about the prospect of having jobs, though. There's been a lot of aimless milling around since we got enough houses built for everyone, and Haymitch has not been the only person drunk on the street in broad daylight. No one has built any shops because no one knew if it'd be worth the time and effort, though there are a few enterprises run out of the houses, like women taking in sewing and such. A fair number of people keep small livestock in their yards or have vegetable gardens. The only other work left is meting out supplies stored at the train station. Peeta has not done anything yet about a bakery and I'm not sure he's even mentioned it to anybody else. 

The money for the factory will come out of the Capitol's reparations fund, so that part is taken care of, but the village meeting ends with a bunch of disorganized talk about whether we have enough people here to fill all the jobs or maybe too many people, whether we ought to try for a variety of industry, whether we need to pave the roads, whether there's enough rations, on and on. I try to listen because I think they'll probably want me to cover a payment at some point, but the talk doesn't go anywhere and people start going home for the night without making any decisions. Then a thunderstorm rolls in and everyone left has to run home quick.

I've changed into dry clothes and am sitting on the sofa toweling my hair when there's a knock on my door, just audible over the hammering rain. I'm halfway there when it opens and Peeta ducks in and slams it behind him, barely ahead of a windblown sheet of water. He's got on a rain slicker that I think I recognize from his wardrobe on our victory tour — it is far more engineered-looking than anything we normally have around in District Twelve. I hang the slicker up while he stamps his shoes and I go back to my spot on the sofa. 

He comes over and sits at the opposite end from me, as if we were out on the porch swing like normal, but it's very odd to be indoors with him, in the dark and rain. Even when we're sitting in his kitchen in the daytime, people wander up to get bread from him — or to bug us, if the people we're referring to are Haymitch — or wave through the window. That's the District Twelve way. Then they go back to pretending they can't see us. I'm not used to being with him where no one can see us.

“Do you think you'll ever stop feeling like people are watching you?” I blurt out.

He doesn't have to think about it at all. “No.”

“I always used to think they were monitoring our houses.”

“Must have been. But I can't see how that's worth anybody's while now.” 

“At least they probably don't have anything in the new buildings, since we built them ourselves.”

He thinks about this. “They could have put recording equipment in the sun panels for the roofs before sending them to us.”

I feel my skin crawl. “Well, would it do them any good, having it on the roof?”

He shrugs. “They could have put recording equipment in my legs for all I know.”

I shudder. “Aah.”

He looks at me. 

I try to cover. I don't want him to think it's about him. “I didn't like wearing my communications headset in Thirteen and at one point Haymitch threatened to implant one in my head and talk to me all day.” 

He relaxes a bit. “That's horrifying.”

We sit there and just listen to the rain for a minute, but I can't really think of anything else to talk about. “Peeta, I've noticed, well, that you're using a cane for a lot longer than you needed to, a couple years ago. I was just wondering if it's a lot harder to get used to it this time, like it's harder with two instead of one …?” I drift off in a feeble way. He has tensed up again. 

I'm about to apologize when he says, “I don't think these legs are working as well as the first one. I guess it's noticeable.” 

I just want him not to have to feel awkward about it. “How are they supposed to work?” 

“Well … they're supposed to electrically communicate with your nerves, where they join together with your skin, and — this doesn't bother you?” I shake my head. But it must bother him, because when he continues, it's not with a logical end to that sentence but, “I don't know if it's me or the … machinery.”

“Wouldn't they have just given you the same sort of machinery they did last time?”

His eyes flick to mine. “Nobody was spending on me like I was a victor this time.”

I don't know what that's supposed to mean. 

“Katniss, do you realize how much money they poured into fixing us up? After pouring even more into killing us?” I seem to just be looking awkward, because he continues, “The winnings that they give the victors, yeah, it's a lot of money, but it's nothing compared to everything else they spent on the Games.” 

I feel like he's trying to tell me something that I'm not putting together. “Are you saying you had to spend all your victor money on your legs?”

“No.” He looks exasperated. “A lot of it. I was surprised.”

“But all the other soldiers, they just gave them whatever they needed, nobody had to pay for it.”

“Too bad nobody ever asked me to join up, then.”

“That isn't fair. That's ridiculous. Also, if you had to spend that much, shouldn't they be working right?” Then I think of something else. “Is it bothering you that I'm spending a lot of my winnings on the reconstruction?”

“Why would that bother me? It's your money.”

“But if you feel like they're expecting the same of you and you don't have, you know, the backlog of it anymore.”

“Oh.” He shrugs. “I don't mind spending what I have.”

We lapse into silence again. I look around the room, feeling dissatisfied. 

“How do you pick what to pay for?” Peeta ventures.

“I talk to my mother about it sometimes. But mostly I just let Thom and Chira and Hap and them tell me what's needed the most and then I pay for it.” He's nodding. “Same for you?”

“Pretty much. Minus your mother.”

I squirm. “I feel like they think I know what to do with it just because I have it.”

He laughs briefly. “Right. And I used to have some ideas about what to do with it but I can't even figure out how to make that work, anymore.”

“You mean giving it to the other tributes' families?”

Maybe he's hearing the same shots echo through his memory that I am. “Yeah. But in most of the other districts, you know, it isn't like here. They didn't lose everybody all at once, it was bit by bit. No one even knows what happened to a lot of people. And a lot of people moved around, to other districts.”

“So you couldn't even find the tributes' families, necessarily.”

“I asked around, actually, and I gave up after three or four. I don't know, maybe they didn't want to be found after so many of the victors got killed. And it used to make a lot of sense to give to the families from our year, our first year I mean, since we lived and their kids didn't. But after the Quarter Quell it doesn't feel as fair to pick and choose who to give money to.”

I listen to the rain sweeping the side of the house. Maybe this is what it's like to be at sea. “I don't think I can figure out how to keep doing this. My mother could, but I can't talk to her just about the money all the time, it hurts her feelings. And plenty of people have figured out ways to set me up to be good at things, but I don't see how they can set me up to always know exactly what'll help District Twelve.”

Peeta is my shipmate over there at the other end of the sofa. “I think in the past you were plenty helpful of your own accord.”

“Till the Games made me a liability,” I say gloomily.

“Well … sort of. I mean when you could still hunt, you know, before they turned the fence on. You helped feed people.”

I consider this. Recollect how happy people were this past spring when I first starting bringing squirrels and rabbits back from the woods with me. They weren't short of food then, though, so what was it, nostalgia? I point this out to Peeta.

“You were giving them hope,” he counters. “You still are.”

“You're saying I'm still their mascot.” I flop over onto the sofa cushions so that I don't have to look at him. I can hardly hear myself over the rain when I say, “I just want them to stop looking to me.”

He gives off a thinking kind of silence. He says, “If they stopped looking to you, would you miss it?” 

“I don't know. I don't remember what it's like without it. It's like the morphling.”

I feel him shift to look at me. “Katniss, you've mentioned morphling a couple of times lately.” 

I guess this is what I get for asking pointedly about his legs. I wait to see if he's going to prod any further, but he doesn't really need to. “I was on morphling, not the whole time, but more often than not, from … when they pulled me out of the arena to the day I shot Coin.” This feels like an eternity in my memory, though come to think of it, more than that much time again has elapsed now. “I kept getting injured. They kept needing to make me calm down. Johanna and I were sharing for awhile but I missed it when she was using it. Sometimes I still miss it.”

He doesn't say anything. I find there are words for something that's been at the back of my mind since the village meeting this evening. “I don't think I could work in the medicine factory. It's nice that everybody's excited about it, but I don't think I want to be around that all day. Just in case.”

I lie there for so long that I get afraid to move in case I'll find him looking at me with disgust. Then I realize that I may as well just get up without making eye contact with him and go find something to do in the kitchen. I'm about to sit up when I feel his hand on my hair and I freeze.

He strokes my hair very gently, almost more of a pat. Then takes his hand back. “You didn't have to tell me that.”

I wave a hand dismissively, irritated with myself and with the lump in my throat. “Too late,” I eke out.

“Can I just point out, though, that you can afford not to go work in the factory.” 

I sigh. “But that's the problem. I don't want to be the only one around here who isn't working.”

“There's always Haymitch.” 

“I hear those geese are a lot of work.”

He laughs, for which I'm very grateful. “There's me.”

“You're going to have the bakery, though, right?”

Now he's the one fidgeting. “I'm … finding it kind of hard to get started.”

“What's the hard part?”

“Well, building it. And I'd have to get help running it because you can't bake and run sales at the same time. And there's no other shops, it would just be sitting there by itself. I have to buy an oven since we don't have a blacksmith anymore. I don't know what prices to set. I'm not sure what people will want.”

I snort. “Peeta, sorry, but people will eat anything you bake. And they'd help you build it if you asked. And couldn't you just use the same prices? Isn't that what you're doing now?” He's not replying, so I turn on my shoulder to see him, but of course I can't read his expression upside-down. “Well?”

He just looks at me. “Really?”

I click my tongue. “Yes. Look, if you don't say you want help building it at the next village meeting, I will, and then you'll see.”

“So how come you're allowed to talk me into the bakery and I'm not allowed to talk you into just being happy with hunting?”

I don't have an argument for this. I stare at the ceiling. “Maybe we should tell them we're better at feeding people than at deciding what to buy for them.”

He sounds thoughtful. “Maybe we should.”

When the rain slacks off, we say, “Thanks for talking to me,” and he puts his slicker back on and goes home. I try to watch after him because now I'm worried about his footing in the mud. But the visibility's too bad to really watch him, and after realizing that I should have walked him home and the best I can do is offer to do that next time, I go up to bed.


	6. Persimmons

↔ Persimmons ↔ 

Peeta apparently took to heart whatever I said about how his legs should be working right for what he had to spend, because he puts the word around that he's going back to the Capitol for a couple of weeks and people should let him know if they want anything from there. He does say that he's going to get his legs checked, which I don't know if I would have told people if it were me, but he also says that he's going to find out how to get an oven so that he can open the bakery. The offers of help with construction (and guarantees of business) come in instantly. He seems surprised but I have no idea why — I told him as much. Maybe he thought I was just being nice to him.

Unfortunately, I now find myself feeling upset with him. He seems surprised about this too. He keeps trying to ask me if there's something he's said that's troubling me, then if it's bothering me that I can't travel and he can. That last one is definitely the wrong question because I retort that nobody could pay me enough to make me go to the Capitol again, I can't imagine going there of my own free will. He looks annoyed and after that we don't talk much. 

There's an early cold snap and we get a sudden hard frost through a couple nights. I'd been keeping an eye on some persimmon trees and I'm able to get a few handfuls of ripened fruit before the animals get to them. 

As I come back home I can see the colors starting to show in the leaves, even though the afternoon is warming back up into early-fall temperatures. I start feeling sort of apologetic toward Peeta. I wonder if maybe I could convince him to come into the woods with me during the height of the season, so that he could be surrounded by all the shades of orange.

This is, of course, assuming he comes back from the Capitol. I'm afraid that something will happen to him, that someone from one side or the other in the war will see him and blame him for something and take it out on him. Or that the people who tortured him are somehow still free and they'll find him. Or maybe I'm afraid that nothing at all will happen to him, but he'll discover he'd rather not live in District Twelve after all, and he'll decide he could open a bakery somewhere else. 

At home I comb my hair and put the persimmons in a bowl and take them over to his house. He calls, “Come in,” and as usual he's in the kitchen, flour everywhere, shaping loaves of bread and putting them on baking sheets. I show him the persimmons. 

“I haven't had those. They look sort of like tomatoes.”

“They're pretty different, they're really sweet. It's best to eat them after it frosts, otherwise they're awful, but if you don't get there in time the animals eat them all. I don't find them every year. I'll cut them up if you like.”

“Sure. Should I put them in something?”

“I don't know, I always eat them plain.”

“Okay. Let me put these in the oven first.”

For some reason he has made a fire — “I know it isn't really cold enough, I just thought it would be nice” — so we go sit by the fire and eat persimmons. They're juicy and pretty good, except for one that I clearly misjudged because it's still bitter and fuzzy-tasting. We make faces and have to pick it out from the rest. He thinks this is entertaining. I'm just glad that I'm managing not to be snappish with him. 

The smell of baking bread fills the house. “What will we do for bread when you're gone?” I hear myself say. 

“I'll make extra before I leave. But it isn't like nobody else can make bread for a couple of weeks.” 

“I know that,” I say softly, looking at the flames. 

He picks up the empty persimmon dish and climbs carefully to his feet to take it to the sink. He tends to leave chairs and things sitting a few steps from all the counters and doorways so that he can go around his house without the cane. When he comes back he sits down a little closer to me. “I'm coming back, Katniss.”

I shrug. “Back in the winter you said you weren't sure you'd come here at all. Maybe you'll change your mind.” Let him be, I keep telling myself. Act like a grownup. You know his coming back was a fluke.

He turns to me. “I'm planning on coming back on the next train. I'll let you know if it's taking longer. I'll call you.” 

All I can do is nod.

He seems like he's trying to think of something more convincing, but what he ends up saying is, “This is uncomfortable, I can't sit on the floor like this for so long,” and he lies down on the hearth rug at an angle that won't stick his feet too close to the fireplace. He studies me for a second and then tugs the sleeve of the arm that I'm leaning on. 

When I don't move, he trips my elbow and I automatically tip over as my arm folds under me. I try not to laugh. “That isn't fair.” 

He just shrugs. His shoulder brushes mine. I lie there beside him — this is more comfortable for me, too, although I'm not in a mood to admit it — and look up at the firelight on the ceiling. It reminds me of what I was thinking about in the woods.

“I don't know if you'd want to do this, but I was thinking, if you come back while the leaves are still in color, maybe you could come out in the woods with me. Not very far in, if you didn't want to, but just to see the leaves. It's different from looking at them in town, it's completely orange all around you. I think you'd like it.”

I feel him turn. “Let's do that.”

I look up in surprise. “Really?”

He smiles at me. “Yes really. I think you're right, I'd like to see that.”

I'm not even thinking, it's just that he's there right next to me, smiling at me, and I draw a little breath and lean forward before I remember. 

Then I catch myself, and I twitch onto my back, feeling shocked, and put my hands over my face. 

Neither of us moves for what feels like an awfully long time. Then he says, very guardedly, “What just happened?”

“I'm sorry,” I say through my hands, “I won't do that again.”

“What?”

I swallow and lower my hands but it's a long time before I can answer. “When I kissed you. In the tunnels, in the Capitol. It didn't seem like it was a very smart idea, or anything you wanted. I won't do it again.”

There's another lengthy pause. Then he says, still cautiously, “But you wanted to, just now.”

I nod.

The silence goes on so long that eventually I look up at him to see what he's doing. He's just looking at me and I can't read his expression. “Well?” he says. 

I don't know what this means, honestly, and maybe he doesn't either. But I know there's a hunger in me that I haven't felt for a long time. I prop myself up on one elbow next to him. I rest my hands alongside his face. I don't even know if I remember how to do this, but I lean down and press my mouth to his. 

For a moment there's just warmth and the smell of persimmons and flour. Then I feel his hand touch my hair, his mouth open under mine. 

When we can't catch our breath anymore I kiss his jaw, his ear, down his neck, and rest my head on his shoulder. My heart is pounding and I can hear his thundering faster than mine if anything. 

After a minute, he says quietly, questioningly, “You love me.”

“Real,” I whisper. 

We don't say a word and we barely move. Just lying there next to each other is overwhelming. When the timer on the bread rings, we both jump. For a minute I think he is willing to let the bread burn. But I take my arm from around him and he gets to his feet and goes into the kitchen. 

I feel silly lying in front of the fire by myself, so I follow him over there and lollygag around while he thumps on the bread and decides it's ready to come out. When he closes the oven and turns away, pulling off the oven mitts, I'm just standing there and it's like we planned it, he reaches for me and I tilt my head back so he can kiss me. I am on fire everywhere I can feel his body against mine, and this is a fire I welcome. 

I am somewhat aware that we sway together, our feet shuffle as we lean into each other, and we fetch up against something behind me, the wall or maybe the icebox, I don't know. My body arches away from this surface. Peeta leans down to kiss my neck and puts his hands under me and lifts me up, lifts my legs around his hips, and we pitch back into the wall as he presses into me. For a moment this feels like a wonderful idea. Then this position gets through my scar tissue to my nerves and I cry out before I can stop myself.

He doesn't register this as a cry of pain, and why should he anyway? He kisses me harder and I have to say against his mouth, “Put me down. Please let me down.” 

He hears me, he does release me, but he hasn't got anything else to lean on and he staggers a bit. I whimper at the added pressure and stumble away from him as soon as my feet are on the floor. I lean hard on my elbows on the counter, trying to take weight off my legs. Peeta's trying to catch his breath somewhere behind me. “What happened?” he says again. “What's wrong?”

I shake my head, still bowed over the counter. “It isn't your fault.”

“Did I hurt you?” he says, and I look up at the alarm in his voice, but I can't tell him no. 

“It isn't you,” I plead, “I can't do this. I should know better.” But I'm cringing at these words, at how they're closing off the hunger in me, for all that they're true. Peeta turns his face away. 

In the moments that follow I try to get my feet back under me, to shift my hips just enough to make sure I can walk. He turns back to the bread. It's like there's a timer in his mind set for everything to do with bread. He runs a knife around under the edges of the loaves and slides them onto a rack. I look over at him, think about whether I want to go to him, but my skin is screaming and all I want to do is go home and lie still. 

Peeta finally looks back at me and he must read my expression accurately because something in his face shuts down. “Would you like me to walk you home?”

For all kinds of reasons. But all I can say is, “Yes. Please.”

He wraps one of the fresh loaves in a kitchen towel and gives it to me to carry. Then, one arm around me and the other hand on his cane, he walks me to my house. The loaf is warm against my ribs in the cooling night air. At the door, I turn to him and I want nothing more than to pull his head down to mine again, but all we do is say goodnight.

I do not sleep well. I'm in pain and my head is spinning. My mouth is still tingling. I get up before dawn and limp out into the woods to clear my head. I don't see any persimmons left and this is fine. I don't want to walk more than I have to, so I spend most of the time just holding still, waiting for game to come to me. That's how I started out hunting this spring. I've gone in a circle, back to the constricted little life that I ought to be satisfied with. It's more than I deserve. I get a decent take, considering — just a couple squirrels, but no complaints there — and head back into town around lunchtime. 

There's a train at the station. For a long minute I'm badly disoriented, thinking I've somehow lost track of time and Peeta's leaving tomorrow. But no, it's only been a week since the last train. The cars are full of construction materials and there are crewers I don't recognize unloading them. 

Maybe this is for the medicine factory — maybe I missed something and we're going to have trains every week so that we can build this thing really fast. The way the last village meeting went, there are probably all kinds of details that we didn't get around to covering. I guess it'd be best to try to get the construction done before it snows. 

It's not all construction materials, apparently, because Jake waves me down — he usually handles the mail — and hands me a couple of envelopes. One of them is my bank statement. Peeta and I never did finish talking about ways to arrange things so that we won't have to decide what to fund anymore. I think about that for a minute, then turn to the other envelope. It's thin and I don't recognize the handwriting. I put both envelopes in my pocket for later.

There's too much commotion around the train for people to pay attention to buying my game right now, so I take it home to clean it — I'll go back out later, or people will stop by. Once that's done I start feeling like I can't keep avoiding Peeta. In the interest of postponing the inevitable, though, I open my mystery envelope. 

Inside there's no letter, just a photograph. It shows Annie, looking much like she did the first time I saw her — disheveled and overcome with joy. She's holding a very small baby. I look at this photograph for a long time, trying to see something of Finnick, but the baby's eyes are closed and the face is just a round wrinkly thing anyway, not really looking like anyone. On the back I find that Annie has written, “Katniss — Here is my son! I can't wait to introduce you! Your mother took this picture. I forgot for awhile to send it. Please share this with Peeta. I'm thinking of both of you.”

I wonder why she sent it to me instead of Peeta. Maybe they still don't get along, because of the memories of what happened when they were held prisoner, or of the things Peeta said in District Thirteen. This seems ridiculous, though, because Annie seems more like Peeta in personality than anyone else I know. Damaged but fundamentally kind. Maybe she just wanted to reach out to me.

Anyway, now I definitely have to go over to Peeta's house. I knock on the door a couple times, but he doesn't answer, even though I'm pretty sure he's at home because I can smell bread baking. I waffle for awhile and then just sit on the porch steps. 

It's probably a good quarter hour before he comes to the door. One look at him and I know he had no better a night than I did. But he says to come in, and so I follow him inside and try not to think about what we were doing when I was in his kitchen yesterday. He fiddles with some of the stuff on the counter and I see his hands shaking. There's sweat at his temples. It finally occurs to me that he's been locked in a flashback the entire time I was waiting outside. “Are you okay?” I ask without thinking about how pointless this question is.

He doesn't seem to mind. “I didn't really sleep last night. Not for the reason you're thinking,” he adds.

I don't know what he supposes that reason to be. “Um. Okay.” 

He looks me over briefly. “Are you feeling better?” 

I can't exactly tell him it depends which sort of feelings he's talking about. “Mostly,” I say instead. “But do you mind if I sit down?” 

He waves me over to the table. Maybe if I sit down he'll follow my lead and relax.

I decide to start with something comparatively easy. “Did you know there's another train in today?”

His eyes flick to mine. “I'm still leaving next week, not tomorrow.”

Saw right through me. “Well, I got some mail.” I take the photograph out of my pocket and hold it out for him. 

He comes over and sits down next to me to look at it. I watch his face and see a bit of a smile. “That's good. She was really happy about that.” He reads the back, looks at the picture again, glances at me and in response to something on my face says, “What's wrong?”

I haven't really dwelled on this stuff since the victor-tributes were announced. And briefly during the Quarter Quell too, but the pretend baby went by so quickly. “Don't you worry that something bad will happen to somebody who's got two victors for parents?”

There's a weighted pause before he answers and I wonder if, like me, he's thinking about the fact that we used to be engaged and staring down a future that included mentoring our own children. He doesn't say it, though. “Do you mean how it always seemed like, if victors had children, the kids were likely to end up as tributes?”

“Yes.”

“But the Games are over,” he reminds me, sounding concerned that I might have lost track of the facts about this.

“I know,” I try to reassure him. But nothing here is reassuring. I look at the picture of Annie and the baby again. “If she's happy, then that's good, but …”

He waits. I realize I've probably never told him this before. “I've never wanted to have children.” I'm trying to find the words but I don't even know if there's a way to say this without being hurtful. “And Peeta, last night, I just … I wanted that in the moment, but I can't …”

He folds over with his elbows on his knees and for a moment I think I've sent him into another flashback, but he just seems to be thinking. I stop trying to talk. 

When he speaks, he's still looking at the floor and I can barely hear him. “I don't think you should feel bad about it. You sound like you do.” He shifts but doesn't look at me. “It's good it didn't go further. I'm sorry about that. I know I was the one who told everyone we were sleeping together. But … too much has happened since then.”

I look at his bloodless face. “Were you having flashbacks all night?”

There's a very long pause. “It got a little worse than flashbacks.”

I clamp down on the urge to back away from him. “Oh.” 

But he has seen the flicker of fear. He looks away again. “Katniss, I'm sorry.” 

“It isn't your fault,” I say automatically. 

He doesn't say anything for awhile. “You know,” he starts quietly, “it's really helped, being able to talk with you. To build up experiences, or memories, that I know no one has messed with. I know these ones are real. I've been trying to tell myself that even if I never quite get the old ones right, or even if I never manage to forget — what they did — maybe eventually that'll be so long ago and I'll have so many real memories that on balance it'll be okay.” 

I try not to sound crushed when I agree, “That sounds good.” 

“But other times,” he adds, “all I can think is that I wasn't even trying to make it out of there alive — I just wanted to die as myself. And now I'm not even sure that's possible.”

I swallow hard, but it's no good. I can't even say that I truly know how he feels. Because I failed too, at keeping Prim alive, but her death is done and I know there's no going back. Peeta may always have this uncertainty facing him. 

“I don't even really know why this happened to me,” he says.

“Because of me,” I whisper hopelessly.

“No it isn't,” he tells me, agitated. “They chose what they did to me, not you. I just don't know — why would anyone do that? Why would that ever seem okay to do?”

He seems to really want an answer. All I can say is, “There isn't any reason.”

“No reason,” he repeats, holding my gaze, wild-eyed.

“No, there's no possible reason that should ever be done to anybody,” I say, trying not to sob. 

Perversely, he seems to find this a massive relief. Like he's been waiting his whole life to have somebody say to him that there is no rational way he could have deserved it, for any purpose at all. He sort of gasps and then just sits there with his face in his hands for a long time. 

I wait with him for a little while, but the timer rings and I go check the bread, trying to mimic what I've seen him do. I don't know exactly what bread is supposed to sound like so I just take it out, figuring he knows how long to set a timer for. I poke around in the kitchen and wash some dishes. While I do that I can hum to myself and just hope he can't hear me over the water running. After that I go back to the bread and try loosening it from the pan with a knife. This is harder than he makes it look and I tear one of the loaves a bit, but since it's on the underside it can't be that much of a detriment. At that point I can't think of a way to take up any more time and I go back to the seat next to him. 

He reaches out, tentatively, and we hold hands. It's surprisingly comforting.

Quietly, he says, “You could have just let me go. Written me off. Nobody who knew what happened to me would have blamed you.”

“It isn't what you would have done.” If Haymitch's argument works on me I don't see why I shouldn't use it on Peeta.

“I suppose not.”

“Anyway, I tried. I couldn't.” And I guess that explanation works, because he just looks at me for a minute and then looks back down at our hands.

“Yesterday,” he says hesitantly. “Did I hurt you?” When I'm just biting my lips, he adds, “I wondered whether you were … remembering something bad. But it seemed a little more like you were actually hurting. If you don't want to tell me, that's okay, I just wanted to understand.”

Pushing the words out of my mouth is difficult. “I just … I have a lot of scars. From the City Circle.” I see his eyes flick to the side of my face where the deformed skin curls up from under my ear. “You've seen it.”

“On your neck there,” he says.

“You came in to wake me up in the summer, you must have seen it.” 

“It was dark.”

“You put the lamp on,” I say accusingly, pulling my hand from his. I don't know what he was thinking about if he didn't notice. “You must have seen it. It goes everywhere. I can't put my arms straight up. I can't sit cross-legged. I can't run, I can't climb trees anymore.”

He's looking at me quizzically. “Is it getting better?”

“Not anymore.”

“But — Katniss, that's no good. Haven't you tried to, I don't know, see if anybody can help?”

“I can live with it.”

“Let me see if I can find somebody to help you when I go to the Capitol.”

“No. They left me this way, they're not going to do anything for me.”

“What, you're not allowed to ask?” He's somehow got some energy back. “Look, I thought if I was stupid enough to get my legs shot off, I just had to live with it. Thank you for kindly pointing out that was not fair. So, it's not fair for you either.”

My voice is down to nothing. “I'm pretty sure I'm just supposed to take what I get.”

He looks at me for so long, even though I won't look at him. “What happened to make you of all people say that?”

I'm not really equipped to run solely on anger anymore. But I can kind of function just on sorrow. “I'm under a sentence, Peeta. I can't just … I got used up. I got broken.”

He's trying so hard to be hopeful for me. He looks at his hands. “My hands healed up pretty well. I know you were closer to the bombs, but —”

“Closer!” I scoff. Closer does not begin to cover it. “If even for a second you wanted to kiss me like that, it's because you haven't seen it. You don't know. You don't understand.”

He's not being hopeful now. Just looking at me. “Do you want me to know?”

I don't know exactly what I want. I want to be able to trust him with this, but I don't want to have to find the words to explain it. And I want him to understand that I'm not what he remembers. 

“Not here, people can see in,” I mutter, and I stand up and head for the stairs. He follows a pace behind me. I automatically follow the wear pattern on the carpet into his bedroom, then think too late that there's plenty of rooms to choose from on the second story. Well, now he'll see why we weren't stripping down in his bedroom eighteen hours ago. I get halfway across the room before I make myself step out of my shoes and work my shirt over my head. I pull off my camisole and get out of my pants. My socks fall off inside my pant legs like they always seem to do. I stand there in my underwear with my back to him. Sunlight streams into the room and I cross my arms over my breasts and close my eyes. Strangely, I now feel obligated to say something. “There was a kid holding a bomb right behind me. Look, I know how this looks. If you spent all night thinking whether I'm some kind of mutt, pieced together out of something else, you're not far off.” 

I hear him take a couple steps closer to me, but I'm not anticipating his touch on my shoulder blade and I jump. 

His hand, just gentle fingertips, withdraws immediately. “Did that hurt?” I shake my head and he touches my shoulder again, lightly across the skin that still makes me think of a piglet, the areas where it abraded off, the thick puckered strip that marks the boundary with what's originally mine. The bones beneath. His fingertips are cool on my back. 

“They left me this way,” I say again. “All they ever made sure I could still do was this.” I lift my arms to shoulder height, left one straight out, right one cocked for an arrow. Then I tuck my arms around me again. He lifts his hand away.

“I don't understand. You were in the hospital with me, and I've seen other people who were there, who turned out … better healed.” He's too polite to say better looking. 

“Well, they got to stay in the hospital, probably,” I point out. 

I hear him move to my side. I can't look at him. That's the perfect half-Katniss, half-mutt vantage point. He says, “Did they stop giving you medical treatment?”

“They … put me in a cell. A room. They stopped giving me medicine. Nobody else ever came in.” I can feel gooseflesh rising on my arms and it must be visible, too, because after a minute Peeta pulls a quilt off his bed and drapes it over my shoulders. I guess he's seen enough. I wrap myself up. I'd really like to sit down now, so without waiting for an invitation I step around my trail of clothes and go perch on the edge of the bed. 

Peeta watches me go like he's trying to figure something out. “Is that why you looked so sick at your sentencing?”

I think back. “They had me all full of tubes for awhile, but not eating probably had more to do with it.”

He's appalled. “They didn't feed you?”

“No, they gave me food, I just stopped eating it.” My voice falls off. 

“On purpose?”

I guess we didn't talk about this part, the one other time we talked about when I killed Coin. “I never meant to live through it, you know.” After a long pause, I can't take any more of the expression on his face and I don't want him to ask me any more questions so I say, meanly, “I know you know how that goes. Don't look at me like that.”

He looks away and scrubs his hands over his face, but then he comes over to sit on the bed too. “I think I thought Haymitch told me the whole story,” he says.

“Maybe he doesn't know.” I watch the sun on the carpet. 

He turns to me again. “You tried to eat the nightlock.”

“Yeah, you kind of stopped that plan from working, if you recall.”

He looks like a bunch of things are falling into place. “That's why you were yelling for Gale. The deal you had with him, back in the battle. You wanted him to shoot you.”

I didn't mean to get into all this. I can't look at him and I feel a little angry. “Lousy excuses for friends, the both of us.”

“He thought you wanted him to come pull you out of there. They put him through the wringer, you know, questioning him, before your trial. He was pretty close to losing his rank. They thought there might have been a conspiracy.”

He says this in an explanatory way, not blaming at all, but I close my eyes. “You know, it's not that I wish ill on Gale, but I just don't care about his rank.” Peeta shuts up about it.

I'd really like to think about something else. It occurs to me to say, “You've never told me what you were doing all that time.” 

“After … the execution day?” He looks up distractedly. “Well, they questioned me too, I think they questioned all the rest of the victors, but nobody was going to tell them anything. I mean, it was only questions, it wasn't — anyway. By then I was mostly out of the hospital. There was this part of the palace that had been taken over by the rebels to live in and they put Johanna and Annie and me next to each other and we kind of looked after each other.” I find myself making a skeptical noise. “What? I'm not that much crazier than either of them.”

“That's not what I meant.” It is, though. A recent mental breakdown and a mad pregnant widow and a half-un-hijacked boy.

“Sure. It's okay, it worked fine. Also your mother helped look after us, and Haymitch checked in.” Oh, like this makes a lot more sense. “But Annie wanted to go home, and your mother wanted to go with her, so they left. And Haymitch left, of course, with you. So that left just Johanna and me. It isn't like I don't like her, but … I had no reason to be there. Aurelius said I could go. I needed to find something to go do. I wasn't sure it was a good idea to come back here, but there wasn't anything else worth trying.” 

He hesitates for a moment, and I find myself focusing on the darkness of the shadows under his eyes. He says, “Katniss, thanks for telling me. What happened to you, where you were.”

I shrug. “I don't really want to talk about it anymore. I don't think about it much and I'm okay now. So don't you start getting all sorry for me.” 

At that, we just sit in silence for a minute. He seems to be thinking — he's absently tracing the scar on his thumb where I bit him. I look out the window. I can hear starlings. But then I start feeling bad for being so prickly. I say, “What are you thinking about?”

He sounds rather unwilling to admit, “Your legs.” 

I look down at them in confusion. The quilt goes almost to my knees. Nothing there he hasn't seen before. The chemicals didn't even get down into my boots much. I wonder if he's being so frank because I'm sitting here technically mostly naked and there's really nothing to hide at this point. “Seriously?” 

“Well, I haven't got any.”

“Sure you do.”

“Come on. Katniss, I think you think there's something really bad about the way you look, but at least you're in one piece.” He sounds irritable all of a sudden. I look at him, trying to figure it out. “It's the same thing you said to me, isn't it? Didn't you kiss me like that because of how we used to be, not because of how things are now?” We just stare at each other for a moment, and then he says, “Well, you showed me,” and he stands up and unbuckles his pants. 

I look away automatically and blush to some deep, painful color in the time it takes him to shuck off his pants and sit back down. But I don't want him to think the wrong thing, so I make myself turn back, glowing maroon or no. If we're trusting each other, then this is probably part and parcel. He isn't looking at me, he's looking at his feet, so I do too. 

All I can think to say is, “Why do you go to the trouble of wearing socks?”

He says, baffled, “They go along with shoes?”

“Oh.” The thing is, to me, it doesn't seem like a big deal whether he has one artificial leg up to the knee, or two of them well up the thigh. The new ones appear more or less like the old model. I cast around for quite awhile before I conclude that all I can say is, “It doesn't matter to me.”

“You look uncomfortable.”

“You just took off your pants,” I protest, blushing all over again.

“Are you kidding me? My clothes aren't the ones all over the floor.”

I look around. They're in about as much of one place as I ever leave them. “Peeta, your legs don't bother me.”

He shakes his head, still not looking at me. “I'm not entirely here.” 

I consider this. Mentally, okay, it's hit or miss, but physically? Maybe it's similar to how I feel about the piglet skin, like it isn't really part of me. I free an arm from the quilt and reach to touch the back of my fingers to his knee. The material is pretty close to body temperature, I think, but I move my hand next to the hem of his shorts to check. The blond hairs on his skin tickle a bit and I slide my hand back to rest on the join, a couple fingers on each side. He twitches and gently moves my hand away. 

“Does that feel strange?”

“Yes.”

“Huh. Maybe it won't so much, after you go to the Capitol.”

“Maybe. I don't know.”

“Or maybe you'd feel better about it if you'd just listen to me. It doesn't matter to me what your legs are made of. Which I guess is good because I don't know what this is.”

He gives me a surprised glance and laughs and flops back on the bed. “I don't really know either.” It's like the blackberries, the weirdest things cheer him up. He tugs on my arm so that I come down beside him. Then he says, “Wait, did that hurt?”

“No, calm down about it.” I tuck my feet up inside the quilt. 

After a long time, he says, “We used to do this a lot.”

“Take off our clothes and talk about our horrible injuries?”

He snorts. “No, just be next to each other like this.”

“Real.” But last night's kisses are burning on my lips. Along with the disappointment of knowing it isn't going to happen again. 

I can feel him looking at me. “You okay?”

“Oh.” I half-laugh. “I'm sorry too, about yesterday. For giving you the wrong idea. Or making things worse for you.” 

“Were you listening to me earlier? I come up with plenty of stupid ideas on my own.”

“Yes, I was listening to you.” The entire thing is ridiculous. We are both wrecks. “Why do we only ever come up with terrible ideas?”

He looks at me sideways. “Because they get us a score of twelve.”

I start really laughing. So does he. “They're not terrible, they're brilliant!”

“Haymitch was so mad at us.” 

“I know I'm doing something wrong if Haymitch isn't mad at me.” 

I think we're laughing in part because we're worn out. When Peeta subsides he says, “How come we can't ever do anything normal?”

It isn't at all funny when he says it like that. “I don't know. I can't tell what's supposed to be normal anymore.”

We're silent for awhile. I get engrossed in trying to figure out how far back in my life I need to go to find something that's normal but not depressing. But Peeta's apparently thinking about the future, not the past. “Look,” he muses, “if you're in the same boat as me, if you can't move well enough for just regular life. Please, let me see if I can find somebody who'll come help you.”

I can't think of a reason that'll talk him out of this, aside from wanting to avoid getting anyone in trouble, but I don't think it'll work. I look at him dubiously. He studies me, then suddenly his eyes widen and he and says, “Wait, I'm not suggesting this so that you and I can … that's not why.”

I look away. I've already had everything I'll ever have. “I know.” 

“Katniss, I think I might have said that wrong.” I glance at him. He hesitates. “The stuff we were talking about downstairs — children, sex, whatever —”

He stops for a breath, and it turns into a flinch as he goes into a flashback. Curls in on himself. Proof that we can't be doing this kind of stuff. I don't know what storms were moving through his mind last night. For all I know it's something about my face so close or the smell of my skin.

I slip off the bed. I'd kind of like to get dressed, but I can't figure out how to maintain any kind of modesty while simultaneously keeping an eye on him. Eventually I drop the quilt and put the camisole on as fast as I can manage, then turn back around. I go sit near him again, feeling tentative. 

When he comes to, his eyes flick to mine and away and he puts his hands over his face. “It's okay,” I tell him, but my voice cracks.

He sits up but keeps his face buried in his palms. I suddenly realize he's embarrassed. Which does not come naturally to him — not the old Peeta, confident and vulnerable, and not the version in Thirteen and the Capitol. Not now either, I'd have assumed, but here he is with all the lasting damage exposed.

I put a hand on his shoulder, and he leans toward me a bit, and then I wrap my arms around him and he pulls me tightly against him. We're just dressed enough that this doesn't seem indecent and we're rocking back and forth a little. His hands move across my back and his cheek is scratchy against the side of my neck. 

His heartbeat has slowed down, but it starts to speed back up and he straightens up and puts a bit of space between us. So then we just hold hands. The only contact that's consistently manageable.

After a long time he seems to collect himself. He clears his throat. “What I wanted to say. I just want to be clear that I'm not going to hold you to this.”

“Hm?”

He gestures with our hands in a little line between us. “This.”

“I don't understand.”

“I mean that you don't owe me anything. Regarding stuff from before. Just because I've got my head on straight most of the time now. You don't have to give me a reason not to … it's fine if yesterday's a one-off. I wasn't asking for anything like that from you. You know that, right?” 

I stare at him. “I'm pretty sure you asked me if I love you.”

He shuts his eyes. “I … maybe I shouldn't have done that.”

I don't even know what to do. I can't take it back. “Well, now you know.”

“Don't — come on.” He looks at me pleadingly. “We can talk to each other, right? We went through all of this together and so who else have we got to sort it out with? That isn't the same thing at all.” I shrug. His voice hardens. “If it's pity, I don't want it.”

This hits me exactly the wrong way. “What, you think you're my charity case now, like I maybe was yours, when we were kids?” I'm too mad to stay seated. Also this is too fine a line to navigate, to balance the horribly long chain of our debts to each other. Before he can call me out on that, I say, “I'll talk to you for as long as it's the right thing to do. It doesn't matter how I feel about you.” 

He's giving me a pained expression. “But it's changed how I feel about you.”

“What?”

“I just wanted to come back here to sort it out. To see if I could make sense of it, you know, get more of the pieces of the story. Maybe see if I could have some kind of life here. I wasn't expecting —” He just stops and looks off to the side.

“You … what?” I'm so lost.

He gives me kind of a hard look. “You're not exactly the way I used to think you were.”

“Well obviously.” He thinks I'm small and not particularly pretty. 

“No, you're not — not exactly like the image of you I had before I met you. I probably still hung onto that even after I got to know you. I had this idea and they took it apart and it hurt, you know?” Like it didn't hurt on my end too. “So when I started to be able to separate out everything that was false, all I felt like I could really rely on was what was in front of me, right at the moment.”

I take another step back. So his idea of who I am is founded in everything that happened in the Capitol after we left Thirteen. And when he came back to Twelve, when we first started talking again, that's why he had all those questions for me, starting with how I could have voted for another Hunger Games. I wouldn't want to be kissing me either.

“So it's more complicated. But it's …” 

How come words are failing him at this crucial juncture, when I can't keep track of what he's talking about?

Trying to help, I say, “Look, it's okay, we can be friends. It worked before.” Sort of.

Frustrated, he bursts, “I'm pretty sure neither of us is talking about just being friends.”

I stare at him, waiting for it to come together. “Are you saying — you still — want —” I can't think what exactly to fill in that blank. “With me?”

He's quiet a minute. This must mean no. I've gotten it wrong, and I'm about to save him the awkwardness of saying so, when he answers, “Not still. I just can't say whether it's for the first or second time.” 

He can probably hear my heart pounding. My stomach swoops and I have to gulp a couple of times. Not the guilt that used to follow sweet things he said to me, but some feeling both better and scarier. I'm also having a desperate urge to backpedal. I haven't been trying to give him a way back to me. Not to me. Just to himself, for however far there still is to go. 

“Oh,” I manage. 

His face is so worried. “Do we know what to do with this if it's real?”

I shake my head. Well, sitting down is what to do, because my knees have turned to mush. I go back to the foot of the bed next to him. We don't look at each other. After a while, I think to say, “Isn't it a problem that we still kind of freak each other out?”

“Yes.” 

“Right.”

He half-smiles. “I shouldn't have said anything. For a decade at least.”

“We'd be old.”

“We can get old.”

“Shut up.” There's really nothing to do but try to laugh. But then he scrubs his hands over his face again. Maybe we just think we need each other, and it'll come back to bite us.

We stare out the window. He says, “Maybe we should just see where we are, later, after we've had more time.”

All I can do is nod.

I feel him look at me. “Hey. Did you turn off the oven?”

“I … don't remember.”

“Right.” He leans over and finds his pants. “I'll, um, I'll let you get dressed.”


	7. I've made my choices

↔ Part Three: In Company ↔  
↔ I've made my choices ↔ 

A week later I go over to his house with my game bag on my shoulder and Peeta hoists his bag on his back and we walk together to the station. There are plenty of people to see him onto the train, many of whom are asking him to carry messages to former neighbors and comrades-in-arms who now live in the Capitol. I'm not sure how he's planning to have time for all this. He's being generous about the whole trip, to me and everybody else, but at least for once it isn't self-sacrificing. I give him a quick hug, because people are watching us no matter what we'd prefer and I'd rather give them whatever will spark the least comment. Then I keep on walking into the woods. It's easier that way.

It was helpful that we said our actual goodbyes beforehand, in his house. Not that we said all that much, but there was a kiss that was far too delicate to have withstood the pressure of anyone seeing it. The kiss equivalent of a tiny green shoot that might or might not make it. We didn't spend a lot of time together in the past few days, trying to give each other some air.

I think people expected I'd spend the rest of the day in the woods singing to drown myself out, because they sure do look surprised when I come back with game.

The next morning, though, when there's no smell of fresh bread in the village, I just sit on my porch and do nothing. It's back and forth this way for awhile. My sleep is hounded by nightmares. At least it's cool enough to shut my windows. You were fine before he showed back up, I tell myself, you'll be fine.

Haymitch wanders by one morning when I'm on my porch, wrapped in a blanket against the chill. He comes up and sits on the swing with me. He doesn't appear to have a bottle on him, but looking at him up close and without distractions, I see that he's looking more yellow than usual. “Haymitch,” I say, “how's your health?”

He looks at me as if this is an interesting philosophical question. “It turns out,” he answers, “that drinking is bad for me.” 

I can't come up with a follow-up and he doesn't seem inclined to say more. He says instead, “I need to talk to you about that boy.”

“Do you,” I say.

“Yes. But you should come over to my porch, because nobody strolls by at that end.”

Great. I gather up my blanket and follow him. At least he's doing me the favor of not inviting me inside. Once we're seated on some beat-up chairs, Haymitch says, “I hear you may be starting a romantic relationship.”

I don't think I like where this is going. I'm not going to give him anything to work with. “How do you hear that?”

“From Peeta.”

On the other hand, that's not a source I can contradict, not if they're on speaking terms. I don't say anything.

“So now I'd like to hear from you.”

“Why, Haymitch? You don't have to make sure anything's going according to plan.” 

I'm feeling defensive, but possibly this is going too far, because he gives me a long cold look and fishes a flask out of his jacket. After taking a swig, he says, “Let me try and explain something to you, sweetheart. If the little problem of rebellion hadn't sucked us all in, I might have been happy to go our separate ways. If not for the Quarter Quell, or the war, I might have been able to let you both go. I could tell you I tried to save the both of you, but we all know that's an overstatement. You were pieces I had to play. And I know just as well as you do that you're still paying the price.” He stops and looks out over the quiet of the square. “On the other hand, I never had any tributes survive before, so maybe I shouldn't assume I'd've been able to stop trying to look after live ones.” 

This is so not what I was expecting that in the silence I'm almost afraid I'll whimper. 

What comes up in my thoughts is the list I made for the Mockingjay Deal. How I was willing to bargain for amnesty for an enemy and a stranger just because they were fellow tributes. How the people I saved made a guard around me to get me out of the Capitol. I finish my thought out loud: “I guess we have no choice but to look out for each other.”

“Which brings me back to the boy,” he says, aiming a finger at me as if to note how precisely I've made his point for him. “He never was much of a killer, but he's a fighter. He stands a better chance than I'd ever have thought. What I want to make sure you've thought about is whether you just want what you can get, or whether you're thinking at all of his best interests. I can be pretty sure you're not trying to please the spectators, but I guess that's a possibility.”

I can feel my hackles rising and I struggle against them. “Did you say this stuff to him too? You make it a little hard to answer, you know, worded that way.”

He just shrugs and continues to watch me. I guess he knows there's not a lot of point in wording things nicely for me. 

Finally, I say, “I've made my choices.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

Peeta and Gale weren't wrong when they agreed that I make the choices I think I have to in order to survive. As much as I've ever gotten any real choices. But what if I want more than survival? What if I want some reason to believe that life can be good? What if it's coming clear to me that that isn't a weakness?

“I think I made my choices a long time ago. About what I wanted. I mean, I'm sorry I didn't figure it out in time to save him. And I'm no good at being kind and so I've had to have people — you — push me back into line. But I'm with Peeta. I'll see him through.”

Haymitch says nothing for so long that I have to look up from my hands and see what the deal is. His expression is kind of intense so I look away again. “Just so you know,” I add, “it matters to me that he can see me through, too. And in case what you're wondering is if we've been over there kissing all day, we're not.”

“Did I ask?” he growls. 

We sit there for awhile longer before I decide nothing else will be said, so I get to my feet and say, “Okay then.”

I'm deciding how best to pick my way through the geese when Haymitch says behind me, “Take your time, girl. There's no rush.”

I usually only answer my phone when it's Dr. Aurelius's appointed time to call, or if it's at such an odd hour that it might be my mother, but it's ringing when I get back to my house and I careen in the door to answer it. “Hello?” I say breathlessly.

“Hi, Katniss,” comes Peeta's voice, and it sounds like he's smiling and I have to lean on the desk. This moment is what I try to hold onto, even when he tells me that his appointments are going to take a few more days than he thought — because they're going well, not badly — so he'll come back on one of the new off-week trains with the construction supplies. Apparently they can take passengers. And he'll be bringing Octavia with him because she volunteered to come try to help me. 

I try to buck up a bit during the remaining time. It seems fine if I want Peeta around, but I'd rather not need him so obviously. All the same, when I go take a place among the people waiting around the train station, I feel extremely ready to bolt for the woods. 

I misjudged where the passenger car would be and so I'm at the wrong end of the platform. I see him step down from the car and feel a little swoop of disappointment that he's still using a cane, but what was I expecting, him to jump down and dance a jig? Our neighbors call greetings to him and clap his shoulders. I can hear a joke starting up about how he better have brought back a prefabricated bakery because Twelve sure is hurting for good bread right now. Octavia is behind him, and I think some people must recognize her — she's been here before, after all, and people saw her around in Thirteen, and her skin is still green so she's awfully hard to mix up with anyone — but they don't seem to know what to make of her presence. Peeta has just drawn her forward to make introductions when I finally edge my way along the last of the platform to meet them. 

I know how transparent we are, I can feel my face light up in the way that I see his do, but there's no help for the fact that so many of our neighbors are looking right at us. We exchange the same quick public hug we did when he left, only it's much nicer as a greeting, and then I can just move on and hug Octavia, who squeals with delight and seems like she'll never let me go.

“It's so pretty here!” she's exclaiming over my shoulder. “I had no idea! All the colors in the trees!” I finally get her to release me and she backs up enough to hold my face in her hands, but she isn't looking at me like a makeover subject this time, just like someone she's glad to see. I don't know exactly how to react and so I do what Peeta was going to do and start making introductions instead. People shake her hand and don't give me any funny looks when she says she's here because I could use a little extra looking after. Maybe they save the funny looks for later, when Peeta and Octavia and I are walking home from the train station, but I don't know what more I could ask of them. 

Peeta seems kind of touched by the fact that people keep coming up and asking if his trip was good. I think this over and realize that it wasn't too long ago when people were keeping some distance from him, probably part courteousness and part wariness. You compare that to two years ago when the cameras finished with their quota of footage of us reuniting with our families (real or not real) in the train station and waving regally to the crowd and finally turned us loose. Our entire grade in school jammed up the bottom of the steps and screamed louder than Twelve has ever been. Peeta tried to pull me along down the steps to greet them, but for one, I could not make myself wade into yet another crowd, and two, however impressed they might be with me, I knew they were there because they were getting him back. I couldn't figure out how to go lie right in the faces of everyone that knew him. We all went along with the show for a second more, him a couple steps below, the sun in his hair, and me trying to look shy instead of misanthropic, my hand petrified in his, and all the other kids whooping and starting to tease. Then he turned and somehow spotted Madge right away and got the others to let her up the steps, finding for me all the welcome I could handle. And then he let me go and melted into the joking, cheering center of the crowd. 

Now he's passing back news and messages to a whole knot of people at the edge of the Victor's Village. I leave him there and show Octavia inside my house, which I have recently subjected to a cleaning marathon. She has two rather sizable bags that we lug in, one of which proves to be full of clothes and the other full of an overwhelming array of skin treatment items. She eagerly spreads these out over the bed in the spare bedroom. “I don't know if Peeta told you, but I've been working some at the hospital, in the burn ward. It's so different from the work I did, well, the work I did with you, during the Games, and I loved helping you look your best then, but I really love this too.” She hesitates and looks at me nervously. “Well, I don't want you to think I didn't like working with you, because I did, we all did, it just — once we got to know — you know, it's just different helping children who can go home to their families —” She stops digging herself deeper when I pat her hand firmly enough. 

“It's okay, Octavia. So is that how Peeta found you, through the hospital?”

“Maybe, but he showed up at our salon! Venia and Flavius and I have a salon, of course! It's very nice, times are a little more modest now but we have such an excellent record at adapting to circumstances. And we looked up one day and there in the doorway was Peeta! You can't imagine how happy we were to see him and he looked so well, more than we expected, and then when he explained he was following leads on who could help you, well of course we were so pleased that it was something we could do. I wish Flavius and Venia could have come but we could hardly just close the salon and it seemed like you might not need all three of us.” She looks doubtfully at my hair for a moment, then says, “I suppose this is a bit of an unofficial thing anyway. But they asked to be remembered to you, and you should write because they'd love to hear from you.”

Octavia eventually dials down the speed of her talking, which is a relief, but it's kind of nice to have somebody else to talk with. As usual, she carries on about things I have absolutely no context for, but I've had only District Twelve and the past to talk or even think about for so long that I find myself enjoying it. 

I walk her around the district in the afternoon. I feel a little bad that we don't really have anything to do here — after all, she can't possibly spend a whole week or two tending to me nonstop — but either she hasn't figured it out or she doesn't mind. She finds the fact that everything has been dismantled and rebuilt very interesting. Haymitch comes over to say hello to her and then Peeta comes over too, and we all sit on my porch and chat as if visitors in Twelve were totally normal. I guess I'll have to wait to talk just to Peeta. I feel a little shy around him in company. Greasy Sae, who isn't shy about anything, comes over with supper, and Peeta goes home for a minute to get a fresh batch of biscuits which I can only think that he must have started mixing immediately upon walking in his front door.

Octavia seems happy with everything, and I finally realize that I'm nervous about her being here, in my house and home, because what can I say, she's a Capitol person. But she was in District Thirteen for awhile, and apparently things are not so outrageous in the Capitol anymore, either. I can probably stop being nervous.

She does do one thing that's become utterly foreign to me, and that's turn on the television. It's hard to believe we all used to have no choice but to watch. I try to watch with her, but it's overpowering and I end up going to bed early. 

The next morning, I return to the routine of stripping off my clothes and letting someone go over my body inch by inch. At least it ended up being Octavia — I don't think this would have worked out with a stranger. She chatters comfortably as she goes along, nonsense and reassurances. The only bad part is when she has me turn over so she can examine everywhere the burning chemicals from the bombs dripped from back to front, drawn along by the creases in the clothes I was wearing. She's very gentle as she examines me, but she says, I guess without thinking, “I can see how this would make it difficult to be intimate with someone.”

I don't think she notices my head whip over to stare at her. I try to clench my teeth around my voice but I just sound upset when I say, “Is that something that Peeta told you?”

She looks up at me, startled, and starts to blush beneath the green. “No. I'm sorry. I shouldn't assume. All he said was that you were in pain and couldn't climb trees anymore. You always made that look so easy. I've never climbed a tree.”

This is all plausible enough that I shouldn't stay angry at her, but I'm still sort of frozen up and she lets me turn onto my stomach again and she has another look at the scars on my back. She doesn't say anything. Somehow all I can think of is the look on all their faces when they came into my room on the morning before we were sent into the second arena and found Peeta and me asleep in my bed.

“We aren't sleeping together,” I mumble into the sheet.

“That's all right,” she says, clearly at a loss. 

“I wasn't pregnant, either.”

“Katniss, I know that,” she says.

“You do?”

“Sweetheart, we dressed you. Maybe people who only saw you on camera believed it, but we knew.”

“Oh,” I whisper. She moves to the other shoulder and starts working her way down my back. 

She's on the backs of my knees when she speaks again, in a tone that isn't at all bubbly. “You know, it didn't start out well, in District Thirteen —” That's a jaw-dropping understatement — “but I ended up finding the propos kind of interesting, the way that we were putting on a show for a cause. It was nice to think that I could contribute to something that was really meaningful. At least, that's what I thought for awhile. By the end, when they finally brought us back from Thirteen to help on the day of the execution, I didn't feel like it was any different at all from dressing you up for the Games. I really didn't know what to do after that. I mean, everybody in the Capitol has to prove they have practical skills, these days, but I didn't know what to do that could possibly be any good.” 

I'm distracted by what she means by this, but there isn't a chance to get a word in. “When I heard that they needed people to help with long-term treatment for the children who were burned in the City Circle, and in some other incidents in the war, well, I thought of you, of course. I thought that I might have a good background to work with children and young people who were going through something awful. And I'm so glad I did start working there. I still really enjoy working just to help people be pretty, I'd never pretend I don't love that, but there's so much more to appearance than that. I get to help them see that their families and friends won't have to struggle to recognize them for who they really are, and that people are looking out for them, and they'll be able to go on and live their lives.” 

I see why she's drawing the comparison with me, but I still don't really know why she's telling me all this. I can hardly hear her when she says, “The thing that Peeta did tell me — and this was on the train, this wasn't in front of the others — is that you said something about feeling that it was a punishment, or that you weren't allowed to be whole. Well, maybe somebody thought that, but it isn't right. You shouldn't have to spend your whole life in pain to pay for other people's faults.”

But I'm a tribute, I nearly say. Octavia just sits there with her hands cradling my feet. I don't think she's even looking at me. My head is suddenly overly full. I'm recollecting the sort of things Gale used to say in the rants I thought were too dangerous for anyone else to hear, about how the lives of deprivation we had no choice but to lead were wrong and unjust and things didn't have to be this way. And I'm remembering what I said to Peeta, that there was no justification for what was done to him. And I'm thinking about the ridiculousness of this round-bodied Capitol person sitting in District Twelve, of all places, telling a miner's child that pain is not in fact an inherent part of life. 

Part of me recognizes that I should not have to think in such grandiose terms in order to accept help. But part of me still can't believe that my sentence wasn't actually to be the invalid I was when I arrived here, or that I ever managed to get myself out of the rocking chair by the fireplace. That it won't betray Prim or anyone else that died if I choose to live out my life.

I turn myself over and re-drape my sheet. Octavia holds still until my feet are resettled in her hands. “We'll just work on what you're comfortable with,” she says mildly. I cry a bit while she examines me, even though she's completely gentle, and I can only figure that she's gotten used to this with the children from the City Circle because it doesn't seem to surprise her at all.

I spend large portions of the next several days lying on a covered table with Octavia massaging and kneading and applying various instruments and ointments to my skin and my hindered joints. This sounds like it should have been pleasant, but she explained in advance that it would leave me aching. In fact I can hardly move, and then just to top things off, all the tissues itch as they start to heal. 

After a few days of me not leaving the house, neighbors start showing up at the door to see whether I'm okay. Fortunately, if I'm up and in a robe or something, I can answer the door as proof that the Capitol lady hasn't spirited me away somewhere. Leevy is about the third person at my door and I realize that I can tell her that I needed help for old injuries without her making a big deal of it, and even better, if I tell her, nobody else will have to ask. Leevy muses to herself that my mother knows how to treat burns, but then saves me from feeling awkward by remembering that my mother can't face coming back to Twelve yet. Then she pats me on the visible, unscarred part of my arm and says, “That's good that you're getting help, I thought you looked like you might be hurting.” I start feeling self-conscious about what I could possibly have been doing. “Hopefully you won't have to stay all bundled up next summer. I don't know how you managed in the heat!” 

I wake up one morning to full sunlight, visible through my eyelids. Distantly, I can hear Octavia's voice along with that of Sayra, I think, who lives a couple houses down. While I'm resting, Octavia has taken to sitting out on the porch and getting to know my neighbors. I hear closer movement and peel my eyes open enough to see that Peeta is leaning through the bedroom doorway. He looks inquisitive. I'm flat on my stomach but my hands go automatically to make sure the covers are tugged up around me. 

“Octavia wasn't sure whether you were awake,” he says, “but I just wanted to see how you're doing.”

It's a lot of work to find my voice. “I'm okay.” He says something and puts his hand on the doorknob and I try to speak more clearly. “You can come in.”

He does, but he looks uncertain. It's been a long time since he was here and we weren't exactly getting along then. Of course, I've been in his room since then, but looking back on it, that was possibly a little weird. I rub my eyes and try to wake up. He does the same thing he did here before, brings the straight-backed chair over to my bedside. I put out a hand and he takes it.

“I've hardly gotten to talk to you,” he says.

“I know,” I murmur. “I missed you.”

“I missed you too. I wish you could have come with me.” I don't, but I'm not going to tell him that. “So how are you doing?”

I groan. “Octavia's sort of breaking down all the bad skin and the connections that don't move right and I have to heal back up, or grow it back. She says it might ache a little. Ha.”

“She looks on the bright side, doesn't she.” He smiles at me.

“I'll live. Are you doing better?”

“Yeah, or I will, with some practice. I can't even explain what they did, it involved too much electronics.”

“Oh. Hopeless.”

“Makes me think I should sit in on the kids' classes and get a decent education.”

“Probably we all should.”

“Anyway, they helped with the balance thing. Made some kind of allowance in case I'm not done growing.” That had not occurred to me. He studies my hand in his for a minute, his expression going solemn. “Turns out it was useful for them to know some of the other stuff that happened to me. I hadn't … well, I hadn't thought to just tell them that I have brain damage. There were a few days where it was me and a whole room full of doctors, they got a nervous system specialist and Aurelius came over and everything.”

It sounds like he's having trouble continuing, but I can't think of anything to say. I rub my thumb across his knuckles.

Eventually, he says, “The flashbacks, these things from the prison. These aren't going to go away. I thought I better let you know.”

I squeeze his hand. “It's okay.” He doesn't look reassured. “So I guess it was true, there's nobody that knows how to really undo it?”

“Well, I could have stayed there, and they could have experimented.”

“What?”

“That's what they said, they'd have to experiment on me.” His eyes look very dark. “I know that's what they did in Thirteen, and I know it got me somewhere, but I said no.”

“I would've said no too.” I pull his hand close to me. 

“I'll be able to walk, that's all I was really trying for.” He says this half to himself.

I turn on my side to see him better, but then I have to grab for the sheet again because I haven't got anything else on. He looks away for a moment while I get that arranged and I feel more grateful than I know how to tell him. Octavia and I are going for functional here, not pretty, and it'll never look great, but right now it just looks worse. 

“Tell you what,” he says, “I have some good ideas for the bakery. Do you want to hear how it's going?” 

He gets so enthusiastic that later I successfully persuade Octavia that I need some exercise. That afternoon we take a walk — a very slow walk, with short steps — into town. 

The old mercantile area has sat vacant for months, except for stacks of lumber and boxes of hardware. But in the past few days a foundation has been poured, and Peeta and a whole bunch of our neighbors — former miners, mostly men, a few women, somebody's teenage kids — are laying out lumber and putting together a frame. There's plenty of noise from construction at the factory site off the main road, but this has a different hum to it, a sense of community, a sense of building our own. Peeta looks up and waves but it's a few minutes before he comes over to where we are staying out of the way. 

“This'll be the storefront,” he says, gesturing to the foundation along the road, “and I think this'll be enough room for people to sit inside, it won't just be the sales counter, and then the whole back half will be the kitchen.” He's drawing in the air just like he did when trying to describe it to me this morning. He starts going on about ovens and where they'll go, and I have no understanding of these logistics but I can't help smiling. I'm recognizing this single-minded energy from the days when he was making Haymitch and me run laps with him. I start to see that he proved something to himself by going to the Capitol, voluntarily, and coming back better off. He stops suddenly and looks at me and says, “I still want to go see the woods with you, you know. This doesn't have to take up all of every day.” 

How he jumped between those topics, I have no clue, but I say, “Sure. I think I need to be in better shape, but we have” — I look over at the hills — “a couple of weeks or more, I'd say. Unless we get a big storm in the meantime.” 

“Sooner rather than later, then, okay?” He looks at Octavia for confirmation and goes back to the construction. I see that he's got drawings on paper as a guide for the builders.

After a few more days and more exercise, Octavia decides my body is in a good enough state to be unsupervised, and on the condition that I take a very thick quilt to sit on and don't climb any trees yet, she lets me walk with Peeta into the woods. 

I feel him hesitating as we cross the Meadow. The summer mass of flowers is gone and there are leaves strewn through the grasses and grave markers. Under a blue sky like this, the sadness feels distant. We take each other's hands and stand in the sun for a few minutes. I don't usually stop here. I'm not sure if he's been back since the day I found him out among the graves. 

When we move on into the woods, we continue holding hands. I don't know if he finds this comforting but I figure either one of us might need steadying at any time. We're walking my usual route, and a few mockingjays show up. I exchange whistles with them. Peeta asks if he should try to walk more quietly and I assure him that we don't need to be quiet today. I don't want us to get stuck thinking about the Games, so I point out various trees and other plants and features of the earth around us and describe what I can about them. I name and imitate bird calls that we're hearing. He's looking all around and doesn't say much. 

I take him up to the lookout point. It used to feel like Gale's and my space, but after having taken the camera crew there, I just don't feel like it's a secret anymore. I don't tell Peeta this history — I would if he asked, but all I really care about today is that I'd like to show him this view. I put down my quilt to sit on, and he gets our lunch out of my pack, which he's been carrying. We spend a long time there, looking out over the forested slopes that shelter District Twelve. There are so many colors and details on the hillsides that it's almost hard to focus your eyes. The sky is pretty, clear with a few puffy clouds. We don't really talk, aside from a few questions and answers on what we can see before us and how it looks in different seasons. 

I've picked out a route for us to circle home, and we make our way to a clearing I like. It's small but it has a nice canopy and greens grow thick here in the spring. There's a good variety of kinds of trees that surround us and red-leaved berry bushes at their trunks. I check for poison ivy and kick aside some fallen brush and twigs and lay down my quilt again. I have to be careful getting down on the ground but I settle on my back and pat the space beside me. 

I don't think Peeta understands that I'm not asking much until he lies back. Then it fills his entire field of vision: leaves backlit and trembling against the sky, with fragments of blue in the few spaces that aren't layered and layered with thousands of scraps of orange. I hear his breath catch. 

We lie there for a long time — long enough that I need to turn onto my stomach to relieve pressure on my back, and he helps me out with this but then turns back to the sky. Our shoulders rest against each other. I doze off. When I wake up, I see that the sun is starting to drop. New shades of orange are lighting up at new angles. He's still gazing around, but he looks over at me when I move. 

“Do you want to go back?” I murmur.

He looks back up at the sky. “Only sort of.” 

At my house, he walks me up to my room and leans his forehead against mine. “Thank you,” he says softly.

Octavia shifts into making sure I know how to look after myself so that my recovery will continue after she goes back to the Capitol. This allows her plenty of time to provide examinations and simple treatments to a whole bunch of my neighbors. Turns out that when people realized she was someone they could sit on the porch and chat with, they started, tentatively, asking for her assistance. She visits them at home, examines their children, discusses old ailments and war wounds and last week's construction injuries alike, and unloads a vast portion of the bottles and jars that filled her suitcase on the way here. On the last evening of her visit, the train is here of course and so there's a village meeting. I drag her along and everyone gives her a standing ovation. She blushes and beams and tries to sit down again immediately. 

When we go home, we sit on my sofa and watch the television. It's been three weeks and I have yet to get used to this, but in a way I'm glad to have it demonstrated that the Hunger Games are off the air. No retrospectives, no reruns, no victory tours, no speculation. Just nothing. There's news and frequent debates on political and social questions, mostly, and it looks like Plutarch was successful in getting his talent shows produced because there's some singing and dancing. There's a show about people that travel to different districts, now that you can travel. And, weirdly, I've seen Gale on the television twice, being interviewed about the aftermath of the war. He apparently lives in District Two, not far from the Nut, and he sounds serious about his work. So that's all. At least I've learned that I don't have to fear what my neighbors might be watching. 

Before we turn in, Octavia talks me through everything one more time — stretches, exercises, which ointments go where and for what, problems for which I should call her, the fact that I should call her anyway just to chat — and I stumble through asking her what I owe for her time and trouble. She looks surprised and pats my hand and says, “That's already covered, don't you worry.” I'm confused into silence. But she just gives me one last good massage and sends me to bed.

It's surprisingly hard to see Octavia onto the train the next morning, although I barely have to say anything because she does all the talking. At home, I pick up the phone and call my mother and ask if she'd like to visit sometime. Maybe she could bring Annie and the baby. 

She promises to talk to Annie about it and get back to me. I'm a little surprised when she calls back that night and says that they'll do it when Annie feels like it's feasible to travel with the baby. I ask if this means my mother would come anytime. There's a long silence. “No,” she tells me, “I'll never be ready. So we'll go when Annie's ready.”

When we get off the phone, I go tell Peeta about this. He asks if babies are hard to travel with. I think it's a “real or not real” question, but I have no notion of the answer. He speculates that it might mean Annie would rather not travel with winter coming on, and goes back to shaping some loaves of dough. 

“Peeta,” I say, “did you pay for Octavia to be here?” 

“Yeah,” he says, and looks up at me as if he can't imagine why I'm asking. “Oh. Don't worry about it.”

“She told me not to worry about it, too. Do I look like I'm worrying?”

“Yes. Listen, you know who else I think should visit here?”

“I can pay you back, you know.” 

“Not if I don't tell you how much.”

“I can come up with a random amount.”

“Johanna should come visit us in the spring, is what I think.”

This is unexpected enough to distract me. “Johanna?”

“Yeah. Apparently the trees in District Seven don't flower in the spring like everything does here. She likes trees, so don't you think she'd like to see trees in flower?”

“She likes trees? I thought she mostly likes axes.”

He snorts. “She likes live trees too.”

“You know all kinds of things about Johanna. I lived with her and I don't know that.”

For a moment I think I've made a horrible gaffe, because I can hear Johanna's voice in my memory saying, _Peeta and I are very familiar with each other's screams_. But Peeta just says, “I talked with her a lot before I came back here. I think I told you that.”

“Uh huh,” I say, but after a minute I realize that he's avoiding looking at me. I think about this and decide I should possibly say something. “Do you actually mean talking, or do you mean something else?”

He looks up briefly. “What?”

“Do you mean something other than talking?”

“Wait, are you asking if I got involved with her?”

Now I definitely am. “Well, the first time we met her, she did strip off her clothes to have a chat with you.”

He puts down the loaf of bread and looks directly at me. “Right. No. She offered, but no. But there are some things that I don't have to explain to her.”

“Like what?”

His eyes flick away and I recognize the stress on his face before he says it. “The prison.”

I've got my mouth open to retort that he could try explaining it to me when I realize, he has tried. And it's probably impossible. 

I shut my mouth and collect my thoughts. Johanna never said much about that time unless it was aimed to hurt or discomfort somebody else, but at least she was willing to put words to it. At least she was there and is still in her right mind. Annie never spoke of it at all that I heard. Now I feel sort of bad about this. Johanna felt like my friend back in District Thirteen, and she just is the way she is, and she helped hold me upright on the way out of my sentencing, and I have never even written to her. Meanwhile Peeta seems to have had some kind of mishap with the dough because he starts tearing the loaf into pieces and laying those on a pan to bake as rolls. 

I look up at him and tell him, “Okay. I'm okay with that.”

He looks like he was expecting to have to say something else about it. He lets go of a long breath and goes back to the bread. 

“Are you in touch with her, though? Can I ask you that?”

“I haven't been. Haymitch has.”

“How is she?” 

“Not … well, not doing as well as we are, I think.”

“Oh. Are we doing well?”

He looks up. “Aren't we? By now?”

I consider Haymitch, still in his house drinking and wondering how to keep us alive. “By comparison. I guess we are.”

In the following weeks, it starts to freeze regularly and the construction efforts at both the factory and the bakery are racing the winter. As I get more physically fit, I try to bring in more game both to make up for being out of commission for so long and to help make sure people have meat beyond the rations to fuel their extra work. Peeta spends most of every day at the bakery. The massive ovens arrived on the train that took Octavia away, and the walls and roof go up around them. People are starting to talk about ideas for shops to put up next to the bakery. The exterior gets finished and I have to put my head in the door to see the progress when I come through town. 

One afternoon I see an expanse of brilliant color through the storefront window. I can also see Peeta on a ladder, up in a corner by the ceiling. He's got the doors propped open and he's bundled up against the cold, except for his sleeves rolled up. I go up to the window so that I can watch without startling him. 

What I see is the canopy over the clearing in the woods. A few days ago this wall, running the length of the room, was light blue with some black arcs across it. I looked at it briefly while asking him if I should save him one of my squirrels. I should have noticed then that the black lines formed trunks and branches. The days in between, I came by after dark and didn't look in, so I must have missed the work in progress. Now the black skeletons are layered over with leaves in a hundred autumn colors. And he has perfectly matched the color of each leaf to its shape — I can easily identify tulip trees in the highest layers, multiple kinds of maples gleaming red and gold below them, a sycamore with a mottled trunk and huge leaves at one side of the wall, walnuts and hickories, a cedar in a splash of dark green by the door, a pawpaw and berry bushes leaning in close along the floor. He's up on top of the ladder at the corner across from the sycamore, painting a beech tree. His left hand is covered in paint and he's basically adding each leaf as a daubed handful of light golden-brown paint, then putting in details with a brush in his right hand. I stand outside and watch him for a long time. 

He goes step by step down the ladder, upper branches to lower, and finishes kneeling on the floor, adding a last leaf just as the sunlight is failing. He gets up and throws the light switch with his elbow and sees me illuminated in the window. He gestures with his head and I come on in. 

“I think I'll have to leave the opposite wall plain,” he says, “because I don't know if I could finish anything before we get wet weather again and I need to leave the doors open for the fumes.”

“Do you have something you want to paint there?”

“Nothing yet. I guess if I come up with something I really want to do, I could close the shop for a few days.”

“It's your shop,” I say absently, still looking at the canopy of leaves. They even put me in mind of the warm smoky scent of the woods in autumn. Cold and paint are the only smells in here now but I can already imagine the way it will be soon.

“I know you didn't really like my other paintings,” he says, “but I think you might like this one.”

“It's amazing. They're all amazing, it's just that I could actually look at this one all day.” He laughs. “I hope you didn't do it for me, though.”

“No, it's for me. So I can look at it all day.” But he's smiling at me. He's holding his hands out away from his sides and dripping a bit of paint onto the dropcloth on the floor.


	8. All we've got

↔ All we've got ↔ 

Both the bakery and the factory are up and running by the time we're getting more than a few flakes of snow. The factory will be running at a low capacity until spring, apparently, when they're going to put up greenhouses to raise the plants for extracts. Until then they're just making mineral-based medicines. But it gives at least a little structure to the lives of most households in District Twelve, and the prospect of making it through the winter without having to abandon the hopes rebuilt during the previous year. 

The bakery is preposterously crowded because it's the only place we have to go, aside from the factory and the train station and each other's houses. Peeta saw this coming in time to scratch the plan for a large display case and instead have a small sales counter with just a few things out at a time. He has a big slate on which he writes what's available, and you can see into most of the kitchen anyway. The rest of the space is taken up by chairs and little tables. People tend to sit facing the wall with the autumn leaves and watch it like something might happen, like the leaves might move or a bird might come out from between the textured layers of paint. Even the people who don't sit around and look at it are careful not to brush up against it. We've definitely never had a gathering place like this in Twelve before, unless you count the Hob, which was not exactly suited to most people and also not that great to look at. 

Peeta could just make bread to send home with people to keep things simple, but no, he also has the goat cheese apple tarts and cheese buns and bread with nuts and iced cookies and hot chocolate. He has a huge container of powdered chocolate back in the kitchen that he shows me one day with the air of having a fantastic secret — he got somebody in the Capitol to tell him where to send away for it. He also causes every family with little kids to come by the bakery on a regular basis by giving away pieces of cookies, claiming to have broken them while icing them or getting them off the pan, to any child that's in the shop. 

When I ask him why he's got so many broken cookies, all he says is that that's what his father would rather have done with cookies. When other people ask me why he's got so many broken cookies, they're concerned that he's not feeling well and could use more hands in the kitchen. “Leevy's husband used to have moments like that, you know, back when he was alive, where all he could see was the cave-in,” they tell me. “Some miners get that.” I'd somehow forgotten that having so many people spend time with Peeta day after day for the construction would have revealed the slips and blackouts in his mind to the entire district. It hadn't occurred to me that people would take them in stride. But they also take this as an opening to ask me if it's me he needs to call him back. That's not how it works, I sort of want to tell them, but I don't. I try to assure them that he's breaking a few cookies from every batch on purpose.

We've had official camera crews come on the trains a few times to document the rebuilding. They call ahead and word gets around. I make myself scarce while they're here. Peeta allowed them into the bakery as it was being finished and chatted with them on camera and said it went okay, but that's him, and that was justified anyway, because it's the first shop in the district. 

I don't know what changes. Maybe I should have found some kind of trouble to make, or gone around being disgusting like Haymitch, so that I'd still seem like a problem. Maybe somebody found out about Octavia's trip. Possibly it's that there are now camera people who aren't from the government. The first train in December brings a camera crew that might have reminded me of Cressida and her team under other circumstances. But they come off the train unannounced and they treat me like quarry.

It seems that somebody, I suspect Haymitch, must have thought of a plan for this situation and shared it around without letting me know. Because when I'm striding up the street, refusing to run, the cameras delightedly calling and nipping at my heels, people don't shrink away. Instead it attracts a crowd. My neighbors close ranks around me and fill in more and more space between me and the cameras, until they can't even get me in the frame anymore, just the ordinary people of District Twelve.

“Did that work okay?” they all ask me at the district meeting that night. I wouldn't be out in public, except the camera people were strongly advised to shut themselves away in their passenger compartment. “We thought it was worth a try, but should that be the usual?”

“I thought we had a free press now, or whatever you call it,” I point out, having had some time to think about the whole thing. Peeta looks at me in surprise. I've been shaking all afternoon and we can't seem to let each other out of sight. He was helping unload the freight cars and never knew the camera people were here till it was over. They were probably safer that way. A fast runner from the crowd around me tracked him down and brought him to me. “I mean, yes, it worked, and I really appreciate it and I wish they weren't here, but …”

Nobody seems to know what to do now that I've said this. I decide to go talk to the camera crew while I have the nerve. Peeta rockets to his feet and says, “I'm going with you.”

“But I don't want to have to put on a show,” I say without thinking. 

He's lost his balance slightly and there's a pause while people look at us. He straightens up. “Of course not. Let's tell them to —” It's really rude. 

I blink. “Good.” 

A half-smile is pulling at my face as we wind out of the meeting room. “You holler if you want a hand,” a couple people tell us. We go out to the train and strike a very hard bargain with the camera people, so that neither of us will be followed or watched or even asked questions unless they clear it with us first.

The winter turns into a tough one, even though it isn't as cold as some. Massive snowfalls take out the power lines and block our sun panels. We still don't have a doctor or a healer and a couple people trying to clear off their panels fall from their roofs and come to me with broken bones. I call my mother and get her to stay on the phone with me as I set their arms or bind their ribs. I am terrified I'll do it wrong, but there's nothing I can do, I can't turn them away. They seem to be recovering okay. But at the village meetings I start asking if we can hire a healer. 

The early frost that gave me the persimmons took out a lot of people's kitchen gardens before they could put up the produce. Meanwhile, it's hard to hunt when the snow is deep. I have my father's snowshoes that keep me on the surface and moving, but there's not as much game to be had. We rely heavily on the rations that come on the trains, and on the bread that Peeta starts selling at a loss only because people insist on paying for it. I'm not sure it's ever registered with him that less than half of Twelve's surviving merchant class came back — there are far more Thirteen people than merchants — and free bread from somebody blond is still not really acceptable to anyone who was Seam.

Another difficulty with the weather, it turns out, is that I can no longer handle being shut inside, alone for days, watching my windows darken and fill with snow. I recognize partway through the first multi-day blizzard that I'm losing my mind, but there's no way to get help. Buttercup disappears, either to hide under a bed or stake out a mouse hole somewhere. I sort out later that it was Em and Greasy Sae and some other people from next door that cleared the walk up to my house after the storm and came inside to check on me. I think they might be talking to me, but I may as well still be in that room in the Capitol. Balled up and mute and unmoving next to a dying fire. I guess they go get Peeta, not knowing what else to do for me, because next he's crouched beside me, looking me over. He smells of freshly split wood and his nose is red. He doesn't try to get me to talk. Instead, he stokes up the fire and puts his arm around me. Eventually I can breathe again. “We probably shouldn't be alone for this kind of thing,” he says.

After that, if it starts snowing hard, I pack up food and a change of clothes and a bundle of firewood and go over to his house. I do this whether I wake up during the night and find snowdrifts growing against my doors, or whether it's still day and they're saying a storm might get bad in the night. Our neighbors in the two houses between ours figure out my habits pretty quickly, which of course means word gets around. 

“I got a question from Sayra today,” I tell Peeta during the fourth storm, as I'm roasting some rabbit over his fire. The power is out but he has a couple loaves of bread left over after stocking everybody else up and we'll be all set for food. “About whether you and I are moving in together.” 

He's buttering bread and doesn't look up. “What did you tell her?”

“That we're the only ones in the district who live alone so we may as well buddy up during storms. It's safer.”

“Haymitch lives alone.”

I forgot that. Probably because he hibernates, as far as I can tell. “Well, he's used to it.”

That night, though, when we are bundled up by the fireplace against the otherwise total darkness and silence of the snowstorm, Peeta says, “Do you think you could live with somebody else?”

I twist around in my blankets to see him. “As in get used to having somebody else in the house? I used to think definitely not. But possibly. It was fine having Octavia here. I never lived by myself before now anyway.”

He looks thoughtful. “I got used to having no one else here. I remember that. It was awfully quiet at first, because normally I'd rather have people around, you know, but after so long of just trying to stay out of the way, this house was … it was a nice change,” he finishes quickly, and I get the impression that he's said a little more than he meant to. 

I don't mean to let there be an awkward silence, but here's what I'm suddenly thinking about. In the old District Twelve we lived with our parents until we got married, or until they died. Very rarely did you get a house assigned to you in some other way. How young would Peeta have been when he figured out he'd need to find a girl who'd free him from his family?

I give myself a shake. “It's been a year, now. I think sometimes that I should go through Prim's things. There are little girls who could use the clothes. I feel like I should wait for my mother, though. And that might never happen.”

He considers this. “It isn't as if anyone else needs the room in the meantime.”

“They were fitting like four families in these houses, you know. I wonder if it bothers people that you and I have whole houses to ourselves.” 

“Well, you have a point. It doesn't seem fair but I can't really …” He doesn't finish. 

“Imagine dealing with other people?” I suggest. 

“Something like that. You know a lot of the other victors were better friends with each other than they were with anyone back home? I thought that was sad, but I can see how it happens. Happened,” he corrects himself.

“I sent a letter to Johanna on the last train and asked her to visit in the spring,” I say. I'd made the decision on the spur of the moment and forgotten until now to tell him.

He looks up at me again. “I thought you might not want to.”

“No, I'd like to see her.” I meet his eyes to show him I mean it. 

There's a little tension, though. It doesn't help that we're undeniably sitting in the place where we kissed. After a silence he asks me, “Can I ask, what ended up happening with you and Gale?”

This sort of thing just seems to be the topic of the day. I take a minute to think about what he's probably asking. He already knows about the very end. He probably is asking about the middle, which was sort of over before I figured it out. “Well. I was lonely, and he was there. But he wanted more than that. And it bothered me that … I think the war suited him. I don't know, the whole thing started going away on its own.” 

“When was this?”

“In Two, I guess. After you were rescued from the Capitol. But before there was any hope of getting you back.”

He nods. “I wondered.” 

That's all either of us says about it. I can't imagine it being worth finding more to say.

The fire burns lower and the room gets colder and quieter as the snow continues to fall outside. We make our beds at opposite sides of the hearth. We can reach each other in case of nightmares, but over time we sleep through the night, most nights. Sometimes it startles and confuses him to wake up with me there, but it passes. Sometimes when we wake up we're closer together. 

When each snowfall stops, we start shoveling at the doorstep and break a path out to the road, then join the effort of clearing the way into town. It's half a miracle we can do this at all. As the winter goes on, Peeta can keep his balance and could lift larger shovelfuls of snow if anybody had a larger shovel. I've built some muscle back now, though I may never be able to have a full range of motion. We throw snowballs at each other for a break, as if we're kids, as we used to do with our siblings. He must have some stash of hot chocolate at home because he passes mugs around to our neighbors. 

Of course it isn't all endless progress. One of the worst is the icy morning we're out shoveling under a flat white sky. The snow would probably be about a foot and a half if it hadn't drifted, and we're making pretty good progress. The two of us are going along parallel paths across the green while our neighbors work toward us from the other end or toil through the berms the road plow leaves behind.

''Katniss,” he says, not loudly, but there's something in his voice that makes me freeze.

He isn't looking at me. I start toward him and then stop, instincts conflicting. “What is it?”

“I'm sorry, but I think I'm hallucinating. What do you think I should do?”

He sounds perfectly lucid. “Why do you think that?”

“I stuck the shovel in the snow and it feels a lot more like putting a blade in a person. I mean, you don't forget what that feels like.”

I don't know, though I can guess. He is not messing around, not if he's telling me something like that so directly. “Okay. Maybe you should put the shovel down,” because that's all I can think of right away.

He lets it go and the handle thumps into the snow. “There's also blood on the shovel, is what it looks like to me. I'm really sorry, this hasn't happened before, this sort of … tactile thing. I don't know what to do.” There's anxiety in his voice, but he clearly knows where he is, and he isn't wrenched into a knot to contain what he's seeing. I think about all this as I wade across to his path and then I'm standing there seeing exactly what he's seeing, a line of gore in the snowbank.

I raise my voice. “We need some help down here!”

Peeta backs away from me, hands held out. “No, look, I'll just go home, I'll wait this out.”

“You're not seeing things,” I tell him, and I'm on my knees beside the cut in the snow, not waiting for the people hurrying toward us, their faces showing they have no idea what to expect. “There's somebody here,” I yell, and I start digging with my hands, even though it's probably too late.

He is so convinced that this is not real that quite a few people have brushed past him to help me by the time he accepts it, and then he gets to the wrong conclusion. “I didn't mean to kill him — I didn't know anybody was in there,” he says, and then he's swearing and on his knees digging with the rest of us. Somehow everybody's scared and I can't take him going “I didn't know he was there” anymore, and I say something like, “How _would_ you have known? We never heard the cannon! We didn't keep count!”

“Maybe there wasn't a cannon yet,” he shoots back at me, as if this is rational at all. Then our neighbors leave off freeing the dead man from the snow and grab the two of us and pull us in opposite directions, even though we haven't done anything but shout at each other.

They make us sit down in the snow twenty yards apart. They finish getting the man into the path. He is blue but not frozen through, and was dead before a snow shovel hit his belly, twice, because Peeta at least thought about it and tried again before calling for me. People are still coming over to try to identify him when somebody on snowshoes comes floundering up the road from the new houses and sees the crowd and cries out whether Rigg from District Thirteen spent the storm in any of the houses up here.

These Thirteen people, it's not their fault but they've never had to deal with weather in their lives. They lived indoors, underground, and maybe we didn't do a good job of telling them how to be safe.

I see the guy on the snowshoes recoil at the sight of the body, and Jake and Chira reach out to him and talk in low voices and make gestures that include Peeta and me. We're still sitting in the snow, looking like people who can't handle anything. The guy looks back and forth between us, and his expression goes from angry to sorrowful. He's got a very furry hat on and for some reason that's making it hard for me to recognize him. It's been awhile since I've gotten this kind of look from somebody.

I stagger to my feet and take off into the unshoveled snow, giving Rigg and his friend and the crowd a wide berth. I can hear sounds of caution behind me as I swing back toward the path, but Peeta reaches up for me and I sink down beside him without reservation. Because this is all we've got. “We're not ruined,” I say into the collar of his coat. “We're not.” I feel him nod.

People bring out a big sturdy blanket to wrap up the dead man, plus a couple more sets of snowshoes for the makeshift pallbearers. Peeta asks me to walk him over there before they leave. With one arm on my shoulders for balance he tells Rigg's friend — he not only recognizes him but knows his name, it's Garber — he tells Garber how sorry he is for not realizing there was anyone out in the storm. 

Everybody but Garber knows that some part of Peeta is apologizing for what he feared he'd done: kill a man with a shovel, without having any idea he'd done it. But Garber clasps his hand and then, grieving, wraps his other arm around Peeta and says, “You didn't do anything to him. I'm glad somebody found him.” He thumps Peeta's back like they're brothers and lets him go and declines his offer to help carry Rigg back home.

Chira wants to walk us to our houses, too, but Peeta says, “If I don't go back to clearing the path now, I won't be able to,” so that's what we do. Chira gives him her shovel to start over with. As soon as the phone lines are back up he calls Dr. Aurelius.

We get each other up in the mornings and stick to some kind of schedule for meals. On the occasional mornings when I just can't, when I'm living what I scorned in my mother, he figures out that he can sit me up and put something to eat near me and, in time, run his fingers through my hair to untangle it, and eventually I'll come back to life. I never told him this happens to me, but he deals with it pretty calmly.

Since the power is unreliable during snowfalls, and since these houses are not the one-room shack I grew up in, we do the thing where we keep just the big main room with the kitchen and fireplace warm and close the doors to the rest of the house. But if we're already sleeping and eating in the same room, we start driving each other nuts eventually. Peeta has a hard time doing nothing. I don't think he was always this restless, though it seems like a reasonable trait for somebody with a sweet tooth like his. Mostly he bakes nonstop. If the power isn't out, he goes upstairs — I think to paint — but when the power's out, it gets too cold, and apparently people missing limbs have a harder time staying warm in the first place. I keep to myself and work on mending things, like I did every winter growing up, or I do Octavia's exercises or sing to myself — quietly at first, but over time I stop minding if he hears me. Different songs seem suitable indoors, ballads and tongue twisters and other nonsense. The houses are big enough for two people to be inside and totally ignore each other. It makes it nicer to come back together at the hearth. When I go home in between storms, I have to admit to myself that my own bed is a lot more comfortable than his hearth rug but that I miss him.

One evening the daytime thaw persists, and overnight what would have come down as a heavy snow is a deep, soaking rain. The next morning I get to enjoy the first sunlight setting the entire world alight. The branches may still be bare, but the bark and all the rooftops are so glittery you'd think we were in the Capitol back in its glory days. I bundle up and take a mug of tea out to my porch, munching on the last of a batch of rolls I got from Peeta a couple days ago, Buttercup next to me washing his paws. I'm trying to decide whether to slog around in the woods when the ground is this messy or stay at home instead. Or maybe go to the woods just to see whether I can climb a tree yet. It's possible somebody will want to come talk to me about the last village meeting but this is not exactly an incentive to stay in town.

From my porch I can see that Haymitch's geese are out of their poultry house, and the ground is so soft that their flimsy pen is giving way every time they press up against it. They break it down by the time some of my neighbors are up and about, and we all have a good laugh as people take turns outrunning the geese to head out to other parts of Twelve. This proves to be less funny when the half dozen little kids from the house on the corner are shooed outside for the day. The geese see easy prey in creatures their own size. I stuff the last bite of roll in my mouth and, along with a few others, sprint for the kids. We all scoop up a kid — I get one off the ground where he's fallen into a surprisingly deep mud puddle — and I take to stamping and hissing right back at the nearest geese, trying to herd them back into Haymitch's yard. Then I realize I'm the only one doing this, because the other adult-type people have simply run to safety with their kids. I take a look at the one in my arms to see what he thinks and he looks right back at me and bursts into tears.

Well, that's great. I stomp and kick my way through the geese and up onto Haymitch's porch. “Haymitch!” I yell over the kid's wails and the honking in the yard. “Come out here!”

Miracle of miracles, he comes to the door before I have to yell much more. Maybe this deafening child caught his ear, or maybe he actually does pay attention to the geese. 

“You have to fix your fence,” I tell him, bouncing the little kid a bit in my arms because I think I remember that this calms them down sometimes. He peers at me and seems entirely confused as to what I'm doing on his porch practically at sunrise with a screaming muddy child on my hip. I gesture at the geese, which are all over the place. “You have to fix your fence and put your geese back in.”

He makes an expression like it's terribly unfair he can't dispute this point. I figure that's good enough, so I head back down and carry the kid to the house next door. I hand him off to a very tired-looking woman and he quiets down. All the other rescuers follow in my wake, keeping a wary eye on the geese. I agree to stay between them and the geese as we go back to our houses, though I slip and go sprawling in the slush in front of Haymitch's yard and I can't imagine why they want to rely on me to intimidate poultry after that. Other people are cheering our success from their porches. My house is farthest away and as the last of my companions retreats to her yard I see that Peeta is standing on his front porch laughing. 

I stop in my tracks and demand, “Are you laughing at me?” 

“No. Well, yes.” He's still laughing.

You really can't blame everyone in the square for watching us now. I start moving again. “I thought so.” 

“That poor kid, not only does he have to fight geese with you, you take him to visit Haymitch.”

“Uh huh. You owe me a cheese bun.”

“I what?”

I'm past Peeta's house now and walking backwards to call to him, “You heard me, you owe me a cheese bun. You can't laugh at me for fighting geese.”

I can hear other people start chuckling now. Peeta's eyes flick over to them. “I see. So tell me, when are you going to get a goat?”

“A _goat_?”

“Yeah. You want to eat cheese buns all day, I think you should help out with that.”

“Not only do you laugh at me, you make me supply the cheese?”

“That's right.”

“This is extortion!” I say. I'm pretty sure that's accurate.

He cracks up. “Of _me_!”

“ _You_ get the goat!”

“What would I do with a goat?”

“Even more cheese buns!” I holler from my porch. Figuring I better get in the last word, I dart in the door even though I'm dripping mud. I can still hear people laughing from their yards. This time I don't mind. I've just learned that I can run and even go sprawling on the ground without getting hurt. 

It snows again the next day, but this'll be temporary. I am starting to get the feel of the end of winter — the smell of growth, the feeling that prodded me out of the rocking chair a year ago. 

On a bright, windy day, I call my mother and ask her some questions that aren't easy for either of us. Afterwards, I put Buttercup outside, just to make this go a little better. Then I go up to Prim's room and stand in the doorway for awhile. Just looking. Dust motes float around in the sunlight. I start with her dresser, and I start with the warm things, clothes that other kids in District Twelve could use now.

The first day is hard, the second is harder, but on and off over a week, I empty her room. I wash the bedclothes and curtains. Buttercup goes in and sniffs around and goes out again. Some things — her hair ribbons, the few keepsakes she had — I can't make myself give away, and I pack these up and put them in my own room. 

I put the box at the back of my closet, next to my fancy dresses. I run my hands through the fabric. I go sit on my porch for the rest of the afternoon and study the crocuses that are coming up through the thin, melting snow and the buds on the trees. Seasons will change, and eventually even I will want to sleep with the windows open again. 

When Peeta comes up the road on his way home from the bakery, I ask him inside, and I ask him if he'd consider moving in with me.

He's silent for a rather long time. “Why?” he says finally.

I'm feeling nervous but I make myself not shrug or fidget. “To look after each other. I think we do better when we're together. Not perfect, just better. I'm not asking you to sleep with me, that's a separate thing. But there's room for both of us, and … I like being in the same house with you.”

I've had another week to empty and clean my mother's room — this time finishing with some boxes to send to her — before Peeta answers me. His answer is yes.

We initially have the notion we can keep this to ourselves for a little while, but then we sober up and realize that we can hardly move Peeta's belongings without anyone noticing, even if he didn't have a lot of paintings that the two of us aren't likely to be capable of getting down the stairs without injuring ourselves. So we have to talk pretty thoroughly about what exactly this means and about what we're willing to let people think. And then about the kinds of households we come from. About how to arrange this so it could last, even though we're both still getting used to having life ahead of us. What we don't talk about is when exactly this became real — when it became okay to want it to be real. It's enough to know that it's real now. It's better that for once we talk something through in advance, but I don't think we could have said any of this to each other back before the veneer came off the both of us. 

It isn't a comfortable conversation for him, let alone me, and a cold wind picks up outside that's just enough of a reason not to duck out of these things we'd have to come back to anyway. When we finally call it a night, it's closer to dawn. We're in my house this time, and I ask Peeta to come upstairs instead of sleeping on the sofa as if he doesn't belong here. He sleeps in the room that was Prim's, which he chooses because it's across the hall from me. Before I fall asleep, I think about this arrangement and I conclude that this is what we can handle now and that's what matters.

At the next village meeting, during the time for general announcements, Peeta says, “If anyone's looking for more houseroom, my house will be available in a few days. Or as soon as we can get some help moving my things.”

There's an air of mild confusion. Hap says, “Are you leaving?”

Peeta glances at me — I'm watching him, determined not to look around, or to start studying my boots — and says, “No, I'm just moving to Katniss's house.”

There is an excited squeak from several women, plus what can only be a couple of men starting to clap, before immediately being shushed by their neighbors or thinking better of it. Peeta and I hold perfectly straight faces, as we agreed. Hap, clearly feeling like he needs to follow up, says, “Oh, right then.” And we all move on.

We just about think we get away with it, too, because we're walking home and no one is bugging us, except that Haymitch silently comes up behind us and claps his arms around our shoulders. “You two could have told me about this,” he grumbles.

I'm trying to figure out how he got the drop on me and I'm too startled and annoyed to reply. Peeta says, “Come on, Haymitch.”

“Come on, what? People are asking me questions and I have nothing to tell them.”

“Tell them to ask us to our faces.”

“Hah, like you'd put up with that. You tell me, have you realized it'll be next to impossible to move back out? Are you sure you can handle this?”

I cut in. “You keep asking us this kind of thing and the answer's always yes.”

“Well, look what a good habit I'm instilling in you. Tell me you've thought this through.”

“More than you'd probably guess,” Peeta tells him.

Haymitch ponders this and continues marching us along by the shoulders. “Okay. I believe you. And what do you want me to tell them when they ask me if you two are getting married after all? Because they're already asking.”

I find this hard to credit, unless he had to run a gauntlet of people hollering questions in order to get out of the meeting room. But Peeta answers levelly, “Tell them we aren't.” Because we agreed on this in advance too. There are things we just don't need to do twice, and stand up in wedding clothes is one of them.

Haymitch looks back and forth between us and then thumps our backs and lets us go. “That's fine. It'd be a lot of fuss anyway. I'll come help you move things in the morning.”

It's more like afternoon by the time he shows up, but that's okay. A bunch of people show up to help pretty early. By dusk we've moved all of Peeta's paintings into an unclaimed room upstairs and my kitchen cupboards are overflowing with baking supplies. Comically, our neighbors leave the boxes with Peeta's clothes in the living room, as if they aren't about to inquire where those should go. 

A couple days later, after we finish cleaning his house, I walk into town with him so he can give the keys to Bess, who sorts out the housing. She looks like she wants to say a whole lot, but all she does is pat his hand and say, “Thank you. A few families have already asked.” Then Peeta goes to the bakery and I continue on into the woods, as if we do this kind of thing every day. When he comes back from the bakery that evening I see from the window that he almost walks right past my house, then catches himself and makes a very sharp turn to come up the walk. For a week or so we are exhaustively polite to each other. After that, we relax and it feels more like home.


	9. Homegrown dances

↔ Homegrown dances ↔ 

We don't have long to ourselves, though, because Johanna arrives in April. From the platform I can see her face in the compartment window, watching for us. I wave to her. She gives me the same hard fast hug that she always has, then the same to Peeta, and then stands back and looks at us for a minute and says, “All right, I guess you must not be doing too bad.” 

I wish I could say the same for her, but she doesn't look entirely well — too skinny, not well rested. Peeta answers, though — “Nope, not too bad” — and he's messing with the strap of her bag, trying to get it where he can carry it across his back.

“Oh, give that back, I'll carry it,” she says. Which she does, but as we head out of the platform she says, “Look at you, you have your hands free after all.” 

Peeta turns around and walks a few steps backwards. He's grinning. Johanna laughs and says, “Nice,” and turns to me. “What about you? You look a hell of a lot better than the last time I saw you.”

“I improve with age,” I tell her. I don't really feel like getting into it in public. She finds this funny and puts her arm around me again. 

It's not much like having Octavia visit, because it's clear from the outset that Johanna isn't here to do anything in particular. People recognize her, I guess either from her Games or ours, and we make introductions during the walk home and show her into the guest room. (First Peeta tells her she's staying with Haymitch, though, which gets a pretty good reaction.) She's not a needy guest, content to do whatever we're doing or watch the television by herself or play with Buttercup. She tells us that our Victor's Village is nearly an exact match of hers. She gets a kick out of the fact that we have a bunch of houses from District Seven. Bizarrely enough, she seems to enjoy our new favorite form of entertainment in District Twelve, which is taking food from the bakery to the front deck of the train station where you can sit and eat and watch the construction in the mercantile street.

In short order we'll have many of the same kinds of stores we used to have, for clothing and shoes and household things and foodstuffs beyond what's sent along in the rations. The hardware store is already up and running, next door to the bakery. Chap is talking about having a space where he can teach people to play the fiddle, since apparently his housemates aren't all that fond of the lessons he gives with the new fiddles he made over the winter. The wages from the factory are fueling a lot of people's ability to dream up things that they'd like to do. They're also getting starter money from the account that Peeta and I set up, and I love watching all of this happen without having to pretend I've got anything to do with it. Meanwhile the greenhouses have gone up over by the factory. The little medical clinic just had its foundation poured, as did the school building, big enough to have different rooms for different ages of kids. The train station remains sort of the center of governance of the district, but people are starting to talk about putting up a building better suited to that. No one wants to call it a Justice Building, but it's the same general idea. We elected a couple of lawkeepers at the end of the winter, at the same time as the district delegate — apparently all the districts held elections at once — and they patrol around and are supposed to enforce rules like Peacekeepers did, but this time they're our own people and we can trust them not to be cruel or corrupt. And if they are, we can elect different ones. 

Johanna says the rebuilding is much like this in a lot of districts, only they weren't starting from a slate wiped clean, so we look comparatively organized. She tells me that she's mostly been traveling for the entire year since Peeta last saw her — a few weeks here, a couple months there, a couple weeks back at home in District Seven. This seems strange to me — she could be at loose ends anywhere, so why not be at home?

She eyes me before responding and I think I can see some form of pain there, but she just sounds scornful. “I'm not a part of my district the way you are of yours.” I don't understand this but I think I better wait to ask again. 

She arrived in time to see the redbud flowers, and Peeta turns out to be right that Johanna really does like trees. I invite her along each day I go into the woods. I tell her what every new bloom is and show her how to recognize our trees, which she picks up fast, even when there's a lot to keep track of. I initially think that having company will leave me without much game for the duration of her visit, but she turns out to have the ability to walk silently and hold still, so we have plenty to bring back besides spring greens. I start thinking I might try for a deer, if she'll help me carry it home. I don't have a bow for her but I let her try mine. Overall, it's a bit like when I took Madge to see the woods, except that I know in advance that Johanna won't be frightened by anything here. Madge didn't turn out to be either, but she was cautious, like Peeta.

We've walked by the Meadow several times before she really stops and takes a good look. It's carpeted in dandelions that glow in the setting sun. I don't mind them this year. I was glad to see them, in fact. 

“This is where all your people are?” she asks.

“The people of my district. Not any family.”

She nods. “But Peeta's people are here.”

“Yes.” I point to the side where the planks labeled _bakery_ are, or were. The grave markers are all breaking down and tilting after last winter. The tradition in District Twelve has generally been to bury our dead, though plenty of people opt for burning — but even in famine we never lost so many at once, and nobody knows how or even whether you're supposed to look after this many graves.

Johanna turns to me. “Is he doing okay?”

“Peeta? Are you kidding?” I can't figure out what to say. That there's no way we'd be able to live together if he weren't okay in most ways? That some days he doesn't even seem to think about what he's been through? That his bakery is the heart of District Twelve? That I'm proud of him?

She sees me fumbling and smiles a little bit. “That's about what he said when I asked him the same thing about you.”

I find my voice. “Oh sure, like he's ever speechless.”

“He definitely was when I asked if you two were planning on popping out some babies anytime soon.”

“I cannot believe the things that come out of your mouth.”

“And I can't believe the things that go in.” My jaw drops. This is what I get for even trying to keep up. She laughs and puts her arm through mine, pulling me along. “Katniss, you're so strait-laced, you crack me up. So really, how's the love life?”

“We're not …” I say before I even decide whether I want to tell her that.

She stops again and looks at me. A couple of expressions go across her face. “Listen, brainless,” she starts, but then entirely out of character she does not continue with whatever she has in mind. 

Back at home, Johanna lets me go and disappears into the guest room and I go into the kitchen, where Peeta's home but, as usual, kneading bread. I'm thinking maybe I should find some way of asking about what exactly he said to her, but he's occupied and I'm still getting out my squirrels to clean when Johanna sweeps back out and pulls me over to him and puts a bony arm around each of us. She gives us a rapid-fire lecture about how war destroys your body, it's true, but it doesn't matter whether it's injuries or a mental block with us, because either way the only way forward is to go back “in the saddle” however we can, which I don't know what that means, and she doesn't care if it's while she's here, we'll only be young once and we need to stop wasting time and have some fun. Then she squeezes us around the shoulders and gives a satisfied nod. “Okay? Good talk.” Then she strides out. The porch door clangs behind her.

I turn to look at Peeta. He's still got one hand buried in dough and he's got his mouth open. I have no idea how this just happened. He looks at me and says, “ _What_ were you two talking about?”

“I don't … I'm going upstairs,” I say, and escape.

I'm in my room chewing my fingernails when Haymitch's voice carries through the open window. “What are you chortling about over there?”

I can't hear her reply above a murmur. “No you didn't,” I hear him say. 

“I sure did,” she says, “and also I believe they just went upstairs.”

I look up and in fact Peeta has come to the doorway, but he's turned distractedly to the window, not to me. She can't possibly know it's open. It sounds like Haymitch is trying to smother laughter without much success. “Don't do that to those kids, girl.”

“Why not? They think too hard, they should relax.”

“What, like you and I do? Alcohol and morphling and whatever else you're on?”

“Whatever it takes. I'm in treatment. I've got a dosage.”

“Right.” I can hear a glug of liquid within glass. “Listen, girl, you may be young still, but you were in this thing long enough. You know there's nothing but luck separating them from us.”

“Her, sure. Maybe not him.”

“Maybe, maybe not.”

“They have each other. None of the rest of us had that,” she argues.

“You're just asking for blowback,” he warns her. There's another glug. “Anyway, you're the one in the house with them, what are you thinking?”

She laughs. “I can leave!”

I hear Haymitch's grumbling recede. I can't really avoid looking back at Peeta.

“Think we can ever get them to stop watching us?” he says, but he keeps his voice low, so it won't carry out the window.

“No. I'd rather go back downstairs now.” He just nods. We both go. We fix supper together. Johanna comes in once she hears us clattering around and eyes us across the kitchen as if we've thwarted her in some way. I try not to meet her gaze but Peeta smirks at her with no apology whatsoever, which turns out to be a surprisingly effective way of making her give up the topic.

Hearing them mention addiction does remind me that I'm lucky, though, and it makes me look at some of her idiosyncrasies in a different light. I feel a little sorry for her. I think Peeta does too. She's enough older than us that it seems strange to be protective of her, and it's even stranger to realize she's envious of us. I'm not sure of what exactly — him and me, or our community, or something else. I think all over again that she would have died for us.

She asks me one day over supper if I've heard from anyone in the Capitol. 

“You mean Octavia and Venia and Flavius?” I say. “We write back and forth. I guess there's also my head doctor, I hear from him.”

“No, brainless, I'm talking about the political types.” I must have a blank look on my face. “You know, feeling out whether you're inclined to do anything in the elections, or whether they even want you to.”

I try to find some clues. “Is this something from television? I don't watch anything.”

She looks to Peeta for help. He says, “Not that I watch anything either, but … Katniss, you read the newspapers.”

“Well of course I know about the elections. I mean, I like Paylor fine, but I get it, better to change them out. But why are you saying anybody would want me involved?” My heartbeat is speeding up and I'm trying not to show how nervous this topic has made me in all of fifteen seconds. 

“I wouldn't, myself, but you know. Photos, some sound bites about what different candidates could do for the common folk. Nobody's come knocking? That's good. Not that you can't go along with it if you want, but I can't say I thought that would be healthy for anybody.”

Definitely not, if my blood pressure is anything to go by. Peeta has the slightest edge of concern in his face. I make myself take another bite of grouse. Chew, swallow, then talk. “I'm sorry, but aren't I a convicted murderer? Why would a politician want anything to do with me?”

Johanna laughs. “You'd fit right in.”

Peeta says, “She wasn't at her own trial, you know.”

“Oh right. Right. Context. No, there was a lot of talk — and not just in the trial, there was plenty of public discussion — about how you were such a popular national figure that there was only so hard they could be on you. I don't think people who do what you did would normally get off so easy, you know. But there was a lot of speculation that they let you go home, not really because you were at the end of your rope, or still practically a kid, but because they might want to keep you around to drum up support in the future.”

I definitely can't eat any more. Johanna looks from me to Peeta. “Is this seriously news? After all this time?”

Peeta seems unwilling to answer for me. I get up from the table and walk off blindly. Peeta follows me and puts his hands on my shoulders to make me look at him. 

“Don't let this happen to me,” I beg him, and this triggers a flashback. I don't know why, I never know why. If I did I wouldn't let it happen. His eyes dilate and he leans on me heavily. I have to hold him up, but at least it's only for a moment. 

He straightens back up and kisses my forehead, and when he can speak he says, “I'm sure you could say no.”

I'm having trouble believing him. I look at Johanna to see what she thinks. “Of course you can say no,” she says impatiently, “that's why I was asking in the first place, to see what you said.” She's looking at us like we're the ones upsetting her.

Peeta has to come in to wake me up a couple of times that night. I'm not sure he's sleeping at all. When I ask, he tells me that he's pretty confident that no one made similar calculations about him, but he doesn't know for sure. I refrain from reminding him that Coin wanted to get him out of the arena, not me. 

I beg off spending the next day with either of them and go to the woods alone to watch the trees sway above me and sing to the mockingjays. I haven't had to do this for a long time. It still helps.

I'm sitting at the bottom of the porch steps taking off my muddy boots when I realize I'm eavesdropping. 

“Whatever the deal is, I'm happy for the both of you,” Johanna is saying. “When you left last year I wasn't certain you'd go back to her.”

Peeta seems to hesitate before answering. “It was awhile before I was reasonably sure that I could.”

“Could? On your end or her end?”

“Any end, I think.”

She must be in the rocking chair — I can hear its familiar creak till she speaks again. “I remember you said you wanted to go home but you weren't sure they'd take you in.”

“I wasn't.”

“It isn't home if they don't take you in. Trust me.”

“Maybe you should give it a try. Spend some time there, see if you could do them some good.”

She snorts. “They don't want me. Everybody here loves you, that much is obvious.”

“You weren't here when Katniss and I were still fighting. I got the impression they might kick me back out.” He says this as I'm padding up to the door, and Johanna's eyes go to me. Peeta turns to see me. 

“Funny, I thought they'd probably kick me out for fighting with you,” I say. 

He just looks at me for a second. I'm not sure how he feels about being overheard, and I can see him pressing on the scar on his thumb. Gently, he says, “You at least could make a living in the woods.”

“A sad and lonely living.”

“Come on. All you'd miss would be cheese buns.”

Over by the fireplace, Johanna perks up. “I've been eating better here than I do most places,” she says to nobody in particular.

“No one has ever visited District Twelve for the food,” I tell her. 

Johanna happens to have the very end of her visit overlap with the first wedding in Twelve since the reconstruction. We're a small enough district that everybody is coming, and I won't let Johanna back out of it just because she doesn't live here. Peeta is, of course, doing the cake, and I think she wants to be supportive of him and this is what convinces her to stop putting up a fuss about coming along. None of us talks about Finnick and Annie's wedding, the occasion of his previous wedding cake, although I get the impression Haymitch is keeping a close eye on him. Peeta seems as well as usual.

While he's off finishing the cake, the two of us have a rather silly time of deciding what to wear. I think if Prim had lived we would have done this kind of thing. Johanna has an entirely opposite idea about appropriate outfits, though — she talks me into a low-necked blouse of hers as a compromise after realizing I really will refuse to wear things that leave my shoulders bare. We do each other's hair, since we both have long enough hair for that now. Peeta comes back with smudges of icing on his face and laughs at us from my doorway until Johanna comes at him threatening to lick the icing off him. They somehow get each other in ridiculous headlocks and both yell for me. Peeta claims I'm about to come rescue him, while Johanna claims I'm about to come take care of the icing on his other cheek.

The people getting married are Saul from here and Layla from District Thirteen. More and more Thirteen people have moved here — in fact, I've heard that people moved from Thirteen to everywhere else in Panem and it now has even fewer residents than we do. I guess they all wised up to the fact that they didn't have to live underground. 

Anyway, the Thirteen people have a pretty good idea of what to expect from a wedding put on by District Twelve, and because we've never needed anything other than what we've already got in order to celebrate, we don't disappoint. The ceremony is short and then we dance. Chap has trained up a whole contingent of fiddlers and the big room in the train station makes a pretty good dance floor. Even if you go out on the deck or the platform for some air or some food, you can feel the floor shaking with every stomp in unison. 

It turns out Peeta and I are both in good enough shape to dance. He skips the faster footwork but he's hardly the only man to do that. Johanna hauls us both out onto the floor as soon as the music begins and makes us show her the steps. After the opening set of traditional dances with the rest of the crowd, the three of us goof around trying to remember dances from the Capitol. Peeta has a good memory for this sort of thing, and somehow when he pulls me into his arms I feel like I know what I'm doing too. Soon we look like we practice this all the time and couples nearby are trying to match our steps and roping us all into teaching them. After a few more songs, Johanna is well set up with a line of eager partners. When we all go back to our own homegrown dances, Peeta and I square off across from each other over and over and wheel away through hundreds of other people and come back to each other again. 

The cake is completely gone, the oldest and youngest guests are gone, and Saul and Layla are doing the dance you could do on a pie plate and gazing into each other's eyes, by the time we go home ourselves. I have no idea where Johanna's gotten to and I have half a mind to look for her but Peeta says in a roundabout way that he thinks she's gone home with somebody else. We hold hands on our walk home and have to lean on each other to get up the stairs. Peeta walks me into my room and then we both flop down on my bed. We're tired and everything seems more funny than usual. We just lie there for a minute. We don't have any reason to stay next to each other like this — no snowstorm, no nightmares — but he says, “Can I stay here? I don't want to let go of you yet.”

“Me either,” I murmur. It's been such a long time. We do nothing but fall asleep. Johanna would be so disappointed.

And this, too, turns out to be kind of a backwards way of starting over. Because we were beyond romance at the beginning, really. After all, I learned the feel of him sweaty, hurt, and crammed against me in a sleeping bag, and he learned the feel of me grimy and exhausted. The nights on the train were so matter-of-fact, getting into bed together fed and clean and terrified, wrapped around each other because it was a source of comfort, even if it didn't bear a lot of thinking about. It seems silly to think of being shy now, but here we are, trying not to breathe in each other's faces. Trying to accept that feeling this way is not a weapon that'll be turned against us.

We don't wait forever, though we do take our time. We have that luxury now. At one point he says to me, “Hey, are we waiting for those persimmons again or something?” I tell him I hope not. And when he finally kisses me, it isn't raw and breakable like last time, it's confident.

A lot of things take time. Believing that politicians aren't about to turn up on my doorstep with cunningly phrased demands of me. Building more houses for the people who move back, or move here for the first time, now that we have work. Realizing that some people will never move back — the whole Hawthorne family, Delly Cartwright and her little brother, and about five hundred others that I'm unlikely to ever see again. Trusting that when Peeta goes on trips, he will come back, most likely carrying a hundred-pound bag of flour and some kind of exotic baking spices. It takes time to feel like we're all making a go of it. 

It still takes an effort to survive another season of primroses. Another reaping day. Peeta and I manage this next one by going into the woods, where we don't have to deal with anybody. We can lie in the sun and yet know no one is watching us. I take him to the lake and teach him to swim. We try to remember the dead without dwelling on their deaths. 

The summer when we're twenty, we figure we'll slip out to the woods at dawn again. Peeta says that the first year after the war, when he was in town for what used to be reaping day, every single adult had a hard time meeting his eyes. It's always going to be a bad day. Better to spare them and us. But when we go out to the porch we find a silent gaggle of children sitting at the bottom of our steps. Not little children, more like teenagers. 

“What are you doing here?” I ask. I'm curt and nervous because children huddled together at dawn still means something to me. They nudge each other awake and get to their feet.

After a minute of all staring around, waiting for someone else to go first, a boy of middle height speaks up. “Well, we know what day it is, and we thought we'd tell you before you take off somewhere.”

“Tell us what?”

“We're the ones whose names would have been in today.” It's a tall girl this time, the only one who I'm sure is old enough that she knows the experience firsthand.

“We wanted to say thank you,” pipes a small one from the back, over somebody's shoulder.

How do you find anything to say to that? I feel my lips start to tremble with the effort. Peeta clears his throat and says, quietly, steadily, “Then it was worth it.”

When we go down the steps I hold my hands in front of me and they seem to want handshakes or hugs or pats. I must be shorter than half of them, and given that they see us every day, they're a funny mix of shy and eager. It's a little like greeting the wounded during the war. But these ones will live.

Peeta and I are nearly out of the yard before the thought strikes us at the same moment, and after a glance at each other to confirm, we turn back and invite them to come with us.


	10. Epilogues

↔ Epilogues: Reconciliation, death, birth ↔

Just after New Year's an envelope shows up addressed to the both of us. I don't recognize the handwriting and I open it and start reading. I stop in the middle of the street for a breath. Then I go to the bakery and find Peeta. I trade him, the letter for oven mitts, and get the bread out for him. 

It's crossed my mind that I may owe Gale a conversation. I have always heard his name around the district pretty often — he's apparently on the television a lot, and nobody's going to forget that he saved their lives in the firebombing. I think only Peeta and I connect him with the City Circle, and that's fine, I don't need anyone else to know. Some people exchange letters with Hazelle, but I'm not sure anybody is directly in touch with Gale. I guess he heard that we're living together, though, because he addressed the letter that way. 

Peeta reads about how Gale will be visiting District Twelve with some other people who work in security this spring, and he particularly wants to let the two of us know about the trip and hopes to have the chance to catch up with us. That's all there is to it. He checks the back of the paper and then looks at me. “You look upset.”

“Catch up? I don't do small talk. Also he can't stay with us like everybody else does, that would be too awkward.”

“Fair enough. But you can do small talk, I've seen you do it.”

“I doubt it.”

He thinks something over and then says to me, straightforwardly, “Are you concerned that you might still have feelings for him?”

“No,” I say honestly. “But what if he still has feelings for me? What does he want in Twelve anyway?”

Peeta puts his arms around me. “You have some time to think about it.”

“Why don't you have to think about it?” I say into his shirtfront. 

I feel him shrug. “I just don't have a problem here. For my own part.”

But I end up being the one to write a note back to tell Gale that we'll see him in the spring.

I swear I don't do it on purpose, dozing off in the woods on the day the train arrives, then being unable to rush home because I've got a terrific turkey that's too heavy to run with. I arrive well after whatever contingent from the train has disappeared into the district hall or their hosts' houses. I sell off my turkey and most of my other game and head for the bakery, where I can just get a glimpse through the window of Peeta clearing the counter — I guess he's closing late. 

It was a little wet today and I go sliding as I dash inside. I catch myself on the doorframe and end up on the floor. Peeta, sounding startled, says, “Katniss, if you're going to run everywhere your whole life, get your boots resoled!”

This argument has been going on for awhile and I don't even have to look up as I untangle myself. “No, I'm telling you, it's the floor, you should put a mat here.”

“Why does it keep getting worse then?”

I'm still on the floor and rifling through my game bag in consternation. “Because people keep coming in the door?” 

“Your eyeballs are rolling all the way down to the greenhouses.”

“Look at that, I didn't squish him!” I finally look up, holding out my pheasant. 

Turns out I'm looking not just at Peeta, but also at Gale, who's sitting at one of the little tables and laughing so hard he's gone completely silent. I get to my feet, still holding the pheasant, feeling like I'm not exactly sure how I got here. Peeta is leaning against the counter and still looking irked with me. He takes another look at my face and comes over to gently pull me to the adjacent table. “Are you hungry?”

“Yes,” I say, trying not to sound like I'm about to run for it. 

Gale by now has shifted to an audible chuckle like a normal person. “You haven't changed,” he says. 

“Hi,” I manage to say, and I can just sit in the chair Peeta draws out for me, I don't have to choose whether to give him a hug versus a handshake or nothing at all. Peeta hands me a roll from the counter and takes the rest back to the kitchen. I take a bite to give myself something to do. It looks like Gale has pretty much eaten supper here, based on the crumbs left on the plate in front of him. 

He reaches out, but not for me, it's to unfold one wing of the pheasant on my knees. “Nice. Those used to be hard to find.” 

“Still are,” I reply. “Hopefully it'll taste good. We had one last year but it had been eating pine or something.” I wrap it up to put back in the game bag. 

“Peeta says you still hunt most days.”

“Uh huh.” I feel suddenly extremely curious what they've been saying. I'm sharing this table with a half-empty bottle of beer and it's a match for one in front of Gale. I've never liked to drink, but I guess it works for them. 

Small talk, I remind myself. “Have you got to look around the district yet?”

“Not really. I think I said hello to a couple hundred people between the train station and here.”

I imagine he did. “It's all different, it's hard even to remember where the old buildings were.”

Gale rotates the bottle around on the tabletop, the laughter totally gone. “That's fine. I saw enough of the old buildings.” 

Peeta wanders back out and takes the last tray from the display. “Have a cookie, they go with beer,” he says and tosses one to Gale. 

Gale looks down at it. “Really?”

“No,” Peeta grins, and takes the tray into the back. Gale studies the icing in between bites. I see him glance over at the wall of painted leaves. I nibble at the roll and I can't think of anything to say.

The bell on the door jingles and I turn to see Lottie from down the street. “Honey,” she says to me, “I know you're closed, but can I just pick up a loaf while you're in here?” 

“Sure,” I say, and get up to go around the counter. 

She must only then take a good look at who else is sitting there, because she exclaims, “Gale Hawthorne! They said you were visiting!” He gets to his feet and they hug and she pats his face like the grandmother she is. “You might not remember me, I'm Lottie Hentstead, I lived by your mama when she was a little girl. Look at you, dressed up so nice. Now there's one of our own from the Seam done good,” she says to the room at large. 

Gale seems not at all embarrassed about this, which I would not have expected. “Nice to see you, Lottie,” he says. “How have you been?”

Peeta has come back out with a loaf and I ring her up as she continues chatting with Gale. She leans across the counter to pat me and Peeta too, apparently feeling extra fond of everybody, and gives Gale another hug before heading out. He sits back down the instant the door closes and I realize he must have been doing this exact thing all afternoon.

“Local boy plus fame and fortune,” I comment, to see what he'll say. 

He shrugs. “You'd think with you two around it wouldn't strike anybody as interesting.”

Peeta and I glance at each other. “I keep a bakery,” he points out.

I'm just annoyed. “Gale, it isn't the same at all.” 

He seems to think better of it. “I know. Sorry.”

Apology or not, I can feel my jaw clenching.

Maybe he feels he needs to say something else, or maybe it's that he'd rather get out of here, because he gets back to his feet and says, “Look, I'm glad to see you, both of you. Thanks for supper. What do I owe you?”

“Your money's no good here,” Peeta tells him.

“What, are we not going to see you again?” I say, taken aback.

He's stacking up his dishes and has to look up at me, specifically at me this time. “Depends if you want to see me again.” 

In the back of my mind I'm grumbling at Peeta for being so easygoing as to say nothing at all right now. He leans back against the doorframe. When I look back at Gale, all I can see is that his neck still bears the scar from the wound that I stitched.

“It's worth a try,” I say to my bitten-off fingernails.

He lets go of a breath. “Morning after tomorrow? Will you be around?”

“I guess I'll be at home.”

Having reached this agreement, we all say bye and Gale's out the door. In the safety of the kitchen, I pound my fist on the wall a few times and say, “He didn't act sorry.”

Peeta listens to me but all he does is finish closing up and take me home.

A couple mornings later, it's drizzling a bit, but not enough to keep me from waiting out on the porch. I don't really want to invite him inside. I fletch some new arrows to keep busy. Gale happens along a little later than I expected. He greets me by holding up a paper bag from the bakery. “Sent along by your husband.”

“We're not married,” I say automatically. Gale hesitates midway up the steps. “Never mind,” I tell him. In the bag is a little goat cheese tart. Peeta is clearly trying to reassure me. I fold the bag back over and wave Gale to a seat. 

I can't figure out how to start over, so fortunately he goes for it. “Let's not avoid this, right? Do you want to talk about anything to do with Prim?”

I stare at him for a moment, making sure he's being forthright, then look out over the budding trees, collecting my thoughts. “Well. What I've thought is that maybe it's too bad that I talked to you so soon after learning the truth. I might have been too hard on you. You played a part, but you didn't kill her.” 

I look back at him. “I've wanted to say that to you. Was something like that what you wanted to hear?”

Gale breathes out. “It doesn't matter what I'd want to hear. I doubt you were too hard on me. I just didn't want it to weigh on you.”

I don't know how to respond. “It's been years. Some things you just have to live with.” I say this as matter-of-factly as I can. 

He says, “Something that I've wanted to tell you is that I've tried to make sure it doesn't happen again. The work that I'm doing. I've tried to make sure it can't be put to the wrong ends.”

I don't know enough to grasp whether that means anything. “What exactly are you doing?”

“Right now? To sum up? Assessing defense capabilities, systematically, to help make sure we're building capacity back up to the right level. Not too high or too low. After that we'll allocate resources, engineer whatever needs to be in place, do some training for local leaders and delegates, that sort of thing. We're doing this in all the districts.”

I think about this and conclude it sounds like the things you heard all day in District Thirteen. I can take a guess at what most of it means, but — “Defense against who?”

“Other districts, maybe, if it came to that, or external threats.” He looks away. “I've actually been asking the same question.”

I twirl a feather in my fingers. “Couldn't you try instead not to have another war?”

“Does that seem realistic to you?”

“Most of us could just go home and stop messing with each other.”

He hesitates. “I can't go back to the life I had here, Katniss.” 

“Why not? A lot of people have.”

“Well, I know that's what you wanted, so I'm glad for you —”

Stung, I say, “You make it sound like nothing. Like you thought this wasn't any good, or like I didn't have to fight to have what I have right now.”

He holds out his hands placatingly. “That isn't what I meant. You wanted this back. And you could get this back. I don't think I ever could.”

“How come?”

There's another silence before he answers. “I just couldn't fit back here once I got out. I knew that I could do more in the world. I could have some influence.”

Influence. Yes — _You could do so much_ , he told me. But I'm not going to argue with him about how to tell whether you're doing any good in the world. We've had that fight before. “You know,” I begin slowly, “I was told that there was an argument for sending me home to Twelve, instead of putting me in prison, on the grounds that it'd keep me available to have some influence in politics. I don't know exactly what that was supposed to involve, but I hear that was the theory.” 

He looks over at me and we sort of wait for a moment, but I guess it's still my move. I say, “It's occurred to me to wonder if you would be the politician knocking at my door.”

His expression closes down. 

“Are you?” I ask. “Or are you planning to be?”

He shakes his head, holding my eyes. 

I nod and go back to my fletching. 

After awhile, he says, “I wouldn't do that to you. Anyway, I haven't heard anybody pursue that idea.”

“Funny, seeing as I've turned out reasonably functional. Maybe Haymitch is putting the word out not to bother me.” I am starting to feel some horrible tension in my chest loosening. 

“I couldn't say. Listen, Katniss, can I just tell you how glad I am to see that you're okay?”

I look up and he reaches out again and puts his hand over mine. After a moment of surprise I give his hand a squeeze and he lets go. I feel like I can remember now that he truly was my friend, that he got me through some bad years. And that he always was made for something more than the coal mines.

He seems to be thinking of something else. “Can I ask you, is Peeta okay, or does he just give a really good impression of it?”

This is so apt that I have to laugh. “Some of each.” But Gale just looks concerned and I say, “No, on balance he's okay too.”

“Good. I just … wouldn't have put money on that, awhile back. I didn't want you to be in a bad situation.”

“I'm in a good situation.” I score a feather carefully along its pin. “He has to fight for it too. More than I do.”

I'm a little surprised to hear Gale say, “Then it's good he has you.” 

I have to look up from pulling the feather apart. “Are you friends? I find out you're having drinks together and getting along and whatever. I know Peeta makes friends with everybody, and you'd think I'd be over it, but it's weird for me.”

Gale laughs. “I guess we're friends.”

“Huh.” The knot in my chest is still loosening. 

He's watching my slow distracted efforts. “Look, do you want a hand with that? I do remember how to fletch an arrow.”

I nudge the supplies toward him. “Let's see it.”

I don't see Gale much during the rest of his trip — just in passing, or in the bakery — but I do join Peeta in the crowd bidding him and the other security people farewell at the train station. He pulls us aside and fishes something out of his pocket.

“Look, this will probably annoy you, but I see that you don't have a hunting partner and that doesn't seem safe to me. So these are for you, to call for somebody to come for you if you need it.” He shows us two matched devices, a little locator and receiver. “I'm not going to pester you to use them, I just think you should have them. They're good units, I've used this model.”

I look at Peeta, to see if he planted this idea, but it doesn't seem like it. He just says, “I see your reasoning.” 

I take the electronics because Gale's holding them out to me. He nods as if that's a relief, then turns to Peeta and they do that combination handshake/hug thing that men somehow know how to do. I still can only view this with bewilderment. They agree, “Good to see you,” and then Gale turns to me. 

I never did greet him properly, so to say goodbye formally seems awkward. But Gale has hugged everybody else in District Twelve by now, so he gives me a hug too. I have to stand on my toes to return it. He pats my back and says, “Take care of yourself.”

“I hope —” I begin, without knowing quite what I want to say. I let go of him. “I hope you find some peace.”

He seems bemused. He says, “Thanks,” and disappears into the crowd on the platform.

↔

Haymitch's liver held up through twenty-five years of Hunger Games so I sort of thought it would last another twenty-five, especially given that he no longer has to add to his list of demons. I guess I should have taken a clue from the fact that he never cut back on the drinking, plus he's been varying shades of yellow over the years since the end of the war. But when his decline comes, it's awfully fast.

He grudgingly accepts Peeta and me coming over to look after him as he grows weaker. We're not the only ones, though we see the need first — plenty of our neighbors take turns, and one household adopts the geese. He refuses to move in with us when we offer, and Peeta seems inclined to press it but I ask him not to. I've never been thrilled to have anything in common with Haymitch, but I deeply understand the need to die in one's own home. 

It's the end of summer and the heat and the memories are taking their toll. For a bit of relief, we walk him out to the porch one breezy evening and look at the stars and the fireflies. When he wants to go back indoors, he can't get to his feet. Peeta practically carries him. 

Haymitch asks to talk to Peeta, and I go home, feeling lonely and scared.

When Peeta comes back home, it's obvious he's been in tears. He looks beyond them now. “He asked me to send you over,” he says. “But come get me if you need to.”

“What were you talking about?” I ask nervously.

Peeta doesn't look at me. “The day I volunteered to take his place.” Then he reaches for me and kisses me hard.

I find Haymitch in an armchair by the hearth, feet propped up. There's a decent amount of air coming in from the porch. He looks around at me. “There you are, girl.”

“Here I am.” I pull up a chair next to him.

“Now listen. You and that boy have to take care of each other.”

“Haymitch, everybody here is looking after us.” They may still take far too much interest in us, but we're theirs. “Anyway, haven't you been telling us this for well over ten years now? Close to fifteen? Do you think we're going to forget all of a sudden?”

“You might if I'm not around to remind you.”

I hate that he's started talking this way. “You don't sound like you're going to lay off anytime soon.” 

“Like hell. You two have to keep your heads on straight. Don't make my mistakes, and don't make more of the same mistakes you already made.” He's irritated with me, but at least this is normal.

“We won't. I'm pretty sure.”

“Oh, that's reassuring.”

“Do you want some proof?” I say, suddenly, recklessly, but this feels like the right thing to do.

He looks at me suspiciously.

It's curiously hard to make myself say it. “We've got a baby on the way.”

Haymitch just looks at me uncomprehendingly for a moment. Then his face splits into a grin that I don't think I've ever seen before. “You don't say.”

I can't help returning the smile, even though my heart is hammering. Because, it's finally sunk in with me, trying to keep people out of my life never gave me less to lose, or kept them safe. And I liked being part of a family. And look at Nicky Odair, he's doing fine. I still have reservations about the idea of creating a whole new person, but this one ended up already on its way and I think I can accept that now. “See, it's a totally different kind of mistake.”

“No, no. I think the term is an accident, or a surprise or something.” He reaches forward so that he can grasp my hands. “Good for you. Why doesn't that boy look happier?”

“Probably because I haven't told him yet. I only just worked it out myself. Plus, you know, we've been worrying about you.” 

Haymitch makes an exasperated noise and lets go of me. “Don't worry about me. I'm fine.” 

I snort. Then one or the other of us relents somehow and I hold his hand. He looks out the window — a full moon has risen and even with a lamp on in here, you can see the tops of the trees waving. Eventually, Haymitch says, “Well, hand me that bottle before you go.”

I kick myself for it but do it anyway. “Sure you don't want one of us to stay here?”

“Have I ever wanted anyone around here? I'll get some rest.” So I kiss his cheek and go back to my house. 

Haymitch dies in the night. At dawn, before going to the bakery, Peeta checks on him and comes back home to tell me.

I feel gut-punched. “I should have stayed with him. He seemed alert, he seemed fine.”

“I don't think we could have done anything. I think he knew what was happening.” But Peeta is pale and his hands are shaking.

In District Twelve we don't normally delay the wake, but Peeta and I call the other living victors to give them the news and the entire thing snowballs from there. We wait a few days for the next train to arrive, and they have to add a line of passenger cars to it. What feels like a thousand people pour into Twelve to bid farewell to Haymitch. Sometimes I forget that everyone in Panem knew who he was — District Twelve's only victor for so long, the drunk on the television every year, then the man who got two tributes out of the arena alive, not once but twice. At the wake Peeta and I stand in the place for the departed's children. We scatter his ashes among the yellow flowers in the Meadow.

The task of clearing Haymitch's house ends up with Peeta and me, mostly — others are willing to help clean but we should be the ones to go through his belongings. Little of it is of interest, or in a condition worth saving, though we're careful looking through it all. But after a couple days I find a small bound journal buried in a kitchen drawer. It begins with the heading “51” and two names. 

He kept notes assiduously at the start, pages and pages on the tributes' strengths and weaknesses, what they did wrong or right, what Haymitch himself did wrong or right as their mentor. The first couple years, they were kids who'd been his classmates in school. His notes from after each year's Games ended are markedly more difficult to read than those written during. The notes also get shorter over the years — always a number and two names, but much less after that, and ever more bitter.

“74: Katniss Everdeen and Peeta Mellark. Fools, but they can fight.” Then, “Rule change.” Then, “At what cost.”

“75” is written in, but has nothing following it. Perhaps he felt there was nothing that he hadn't already said. There's just a smear of ink as if he couldn't keep hold of the pen.

I show the book to Peeta, but he is literally unable to read it. He tries a couple of times, and it makes him ill. After a few days of trying to make up my mind, I wrap up the book of the dead and put it with the other things that I have saved over the years. Then I decide I've waited long enough, and it's time to tell Peeta that he'll be a father.

↔

I come home in a snowfall that slowly accumulates on the leaf buds. It's near dark and I'm not surprised to see Peeta coming out on the porch to meet me. 

“Came on suddenly, didn't it,” he says, in a tone of voice that indicates he's been trying not to worry. Most days he doesn't. Most days I do. At first I think he's developed some kind of sixth sense. Then I realize he's only talking about the snow. I'd answer but I'm hanging onto the porch rail, gritting my teeth. He's at my side. “What's wrong?”

“Nothing. Probably. My water broke about an hour ago.”

I see the wave of apprehension on his face and realize I probably have a similar expression. He puts his arm around me and supports me up the steps. He manages to wait to call for my mother till the door is closed behind us. She came on the train yesterday, even though I'm supposedly not due for another week or so, but given what's going on right now I guess that was a smart move. 

Peeta helps me undress and get into the bath to warm up. The walk back in the snow would have been fine if either I'd been dry or it hadn't been getting windy. My mother examines me and reminds me what I'll be feeling and what to watch out for. Then she lets me be. It's taken us a long time, but we've come to this much of an understanding, that once the desperate times were past, once what I needed guidance with was things as normal as a boy and broken bones and, now, a baby, I could turn to her and she would do her best to help, and we'd just leave the rest of it in peace. 

After that we wait. I clean my rabbits, even though I have to keep stopping and holding onto the counter. Peeta starts a loaf of bread, then a couple more, because he keeps losing track of how much flour he's added. He can't do nothing, though, so after he gives up in the kitchen we just pace together. 

The wind ratchets up outside and the power goes out. The two of them make a bed for me in front of the hearth and trade off sitting by me and walking with me. 

The fear I have felt up till now seems like nothing compared to my terror at how soon I'll no longer be able to keep this child safe. Hope seems like a fragile lifeline, even in the world as it is now. Peeta puts his arms around me and I try to anchor myself there instead of in my fears. 

It's hard, though, because he's fighting that battle too. The first time a contraction gives me no choice but to scream, I know that I'm losing him to his memories. I don't want to be alone and my mother has enough to do with giving me instructions and trying to make sure that my damaged body is handling this. So I start singing to myself in the moments when I can catch my breath, mumbling and hardly audible, because I don't know how else to get myself through. 

After a little while, Peeta hears my voice and takes my hands and says, “I'm here.” 

“Stay with me,” I plead.

“Always.” And we see each other through.

It's the middle of the night when I give birth to a daughter. I look up, dazed, in time to see Peeta reach and touch the baby's toes in amazement. My mother is both laughing and crying. She cleans the baby up and puts her on my chest. I try to get accustomed to this but every second is new and overwhelming. Peeta is speechless and elated and fidgeting like crazy beside me and so, in a completely ignorant and cautious way, we figure out how to transfer the baby to his arms. I look up at them in the firelight and feel some kind of happiness that I've never felt before.

I drowse for awhile. I wake up in time for dawn and talk him into carrying me outdoors to watch the sun rise. The wind cleared off the porch before it went still and I think the day will thaw, but everything we can see now is snowy and untouched and quiet. My mother follows us out, carrying the baby, and once I'm arranged in the porch swing she tucks her deep into the front of my furs, against my heart where it's warm. Peeta sits behind me, his arms around me, and we stare down at her tiny features and talk about what to name her. The world turns brilliant around us. When we go back in, my mother has fallen asleep on the sofa. 

Peeta settles me and the baby at the hearth again and brings some bread from the kitchen. He sits beside me and I rest my head on his leg, and we toast the bread over the fire and share it. We've done the toasting before, when the time seemed right, and it seems right again today. We've gotten this far together, we have made this life together, and that feels like a victory on our own terms.


End file.
